Lesson 14: Mini-Project - Animation

Prompt: Write down as many types of movement and animations as you can remember from the previous lesson. Make sure you know what blocks and patterns you need to make those movements, and when those movements would be useful.

Share: Allow students to share out what they remember as a group review.

Discussion Goal: The goal of this discussion is to review the different types of movement and animations that students have learned. As students talk about the different methods, make sure that they are mentioning why that type of movement would be useful. Press them to be specific about what they might animate using the various methods.

Now that we can control the way that our sprites move a little better, we're going to have a chance to put everything together to make an animation from scratch.

Question of the Day: How can we combine different programming patterns to make a complete animation?

Facilitating Mini-Projects: Mini-Projects act as checkpoints in the curricula and cover the subset of skills students have seen so far in the unit. They are designed for 1-2 days of implementation as a way to check-in with how well students understand the course content so far. You may decide to extend these projects as a way to support or challenge students, which could allow you to revisit difficult concepts or support students who may have missed lessons and are trying to catch up. However, we recommend deciding this ahead of time and being firm with students about how much time they have for each project - otherwise, it's easy for projects to drag-out to multiple days and for student's work to spiral beyond the scope of this project.

Distribute: Pass out copies of the Animated Scene. Students should use this worksheet to guide them through the Problem-Solving Process and plan out the animated scene they create at the end of this lesson.

Facilitating Group Projects: If students are working in pairs or small teams to complete projects, consider showing these two videos to the class:

• How Teamwork Works
• Dealing with Disagreements

Depending on your goals with this project, consider having teams complete a Student Guide to Team Planning, which reinforces the message in the video

Optional Transition You can choose to either send students to Code Studio to see an example of an animated scene in level 1 or you can show the example in the slides.

Circulate: As students fill out a description of the animated scene they want to create, circulate the room to ask students about their ideas and help guide them to make sure they are thinking of how they could incorporate movement in a scene with the draw loop.

As students answer questions about the design of their scenes, continue to ensure that they are thinking about movement and using the draw loop. After they have completed their designs, ensure that they can identify which sprites will be needed and what sprite properties they need to animate for desired movement in their scene.

Scoping Student Projects: Students may ideate projects that are beyond the skills they currently have or that would take longer than the allotted time to implement. Rather than asking students to choose a different project, consider asking students to imagine a more scaled-down version of their initial idea. As an analogy, if students initial idea is the "Run" step, imagine a less intense version that represents what the "Walk" step would look like. If necessary, you can keep going back further to a "Crawl" step as well.

Digging Deeper: This is sometimes referred to as the Minimal Viable Product - you can learn more about this process and adapt it into your project strategies by reading this article: Making Sense of MVP by Henrik Kniberg

Distribute: Hand out a copy of the Problem Solving with Programming to pairs of students or have them take this resource out if they still have it after the last project. Encourage students to look over the guide.

Display: Show the slide with the problem solving process graphic.

Many of you are ready to start creating your programs. Don't forget about using the problem solving process to help with the blank screen effect. If you feel stuck or you’re not sure what to do next, remember you can always follow the steps of the problem-solving process to define your next step, prepare for what you want to code, try it out, then reflect on whether or not it solved your problem.

Circulate: Encourage students to use the steps in the Problem-Solving Process for Programming when they get stuck or are unsure of what to do next.

Not all bullets in the Problem Solving Process will be applicable to every problem a student has. Instead, encourage them to pick one or two from each category to try each time they are stuck

After you have checked the designs, allow students to log into Code Studio and code their programs.

Transition: Send students to Code Studio.

Scaffolded Tasks: The tasks for this mini-project are broken down for students with each level focusing on a particular part of the project (background, sprites, text, etc). Encourage students to follow the instructions in each level, focusing on one task at a time.

Debugging Strategies: As students design and implement their own project ideas, they may find themselves with new bugs that they need to untangle and you may find yourself looking at completely unfamiliar code as students look for help troubleshooting their errors. To help smooth out the debugging experience, consider the following strategies:

• Review the Teacher Guide to Debugging for some common questions and strategies to help support students in debugging their code
• Have students follow the steps in the Student Guide to Debugging and use the Bug Report Quarter-Sheets as an initial step in the debugging process. This helps students prepare and communicate their issue before asking for help.
• If students haven't seen it yet, consider showing the Debugging Video to the class to reinforce debugging best practices.

Digging Deeper: Consider supplying students with an object to talk to as part of the debugging process. This is sometimes known as Rubber Duck Debugging - you can learn more on the website https://rubberduckdebugging.com/

Allow students to walk around the room and see the pictures that each of their classmates has coded. Celebrate all of the different ideas that students were able to implement with the same basic code.

You may choose to formalize this process by having each student write down one positive quality of each project, or having students "draw names" to comment on one particular classmate's work.

Use the project rubric attached to this lesson to assess student mastery of learning goals.

Question of the Day: How can we combine different programming patterns to make a complete animation?

Prompt: What was one interesting way that you saw sprite movement used today?

Share: Have students share out what they appreciated about their classmates' projects. You may want to do this "popcorn" style, with each student who responds choosing the next person to share.

Discussion Goal: This discussion should serve as a celebration of what the students have accomplished. As students share out what they have seen, encourage them to learn from each other and ask questions if they were not sure how to do something. Highlight how students were able to do very different things with the same tool.