Animated Valentine Cards

Young learners often create valentine cards for parents, family, and friends. If computers are used, KidPix is the program of choice. However, we took a shot at using Scratch to enliven the cards. Keep in mind that given the same amount of time for KidPix and Scratch, the KidPix art will be more complex than what you see in Scratch since some of the KidPix drawing time is taken up with Scratch programming. However, adding some life to the picture can more than make up for the simpler design.

First grade students had about one hour to be introduced to some new programming tools and then create their cards. There was a lot of student-helping-student collaboration during this activity.

The second graders had a little less time but by virtue of having an extra year of computer-based drawing under their belts, their cards have a little more flash to them. We will be interested in seeing what this year's first graders produce next year.

All the students were introduced to the concept of attributes of an object. In these valentine cards, the objects are hearts and text. The attributes included color, size, and visibilty. Students saw how to set and alter the attributes. Visibility is interesting: just because an object is not visible, it still exists. However, when an object is hidden, other objects cannot sense its presence. The second graders are creating a game that allows their characters to hide so they can be temporarily safe from capture. So, there is more to come...

To blink an object, students needed to set the time to "hide" and to "show." Scratch has a wait command that accepts the time in seconds. The students are quite comfortable using wait to control the apparent speed of object movement.

Here are the cards from the first graders.

Here are the cards from the second graders.