Abstract
A singing monkey? An elderly couple doing the chicken dance? What kind of funny electronic cards do you like to email people? Feel free to dream up your coolest and funniest card ideas, because in this science project, you'll create your own animated greeting card with a simple-to-use programming language called Scratch. Scratch is a programming language that makes it easy to create interactive stories, games, music, and art. When the program you have written is complete, you can even share it online!Objective
Use the Scratch programming language to make an interactive greeting card.
Introduction
Who doesn't like to get a greeting card? Getting a card lets you know that someone took time out of their day to think of you. But more and more these days, people are sending and receiving electronic greeting cards. These "e-cards" have the advantage of being easy to send, quickly received (now it doesn't matter if I don't remember my grandmother's birthday until the day of!), and more fun because of their interactive nature.
Figure 1. Example of a greeting card made with Scratch. The pictures (called sprites) can be made to move, spin, change size, and even allow for viewer interaction.
To activate the sprites in this greeting card, follow these steps:
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The recipient gets to interact with the card by clicking on it, answering a question, or pressing buttons, and the interaction usually triggers an animation. But what is an electronic card, and how does it work? The electronic greeting card is actually a computer program. Any time you are using a computer, you are interacting with a computer program. The program tells the computer what to do. When you type something with a keyboard, for example, computer programs translate the sequence of keys you hit into a list of letters on the screen. Other programs allow you to upload pictures and send them to friends online. In this computer science project, you won't just use programs written by someone else, you will write your own interactive computer program with an easy-to-use program called Scratch. While advanced computer programming languages often involve typing in many lines of code, with complex instructions, Scratch is built for beginning programmers and has lots of easy-to-understand blocks of code that you snap together to give the computer its instructions. Plus, it's fun and gives you the power to create almost anything you can dream up!
In Scratch, coding (creating the program) is done with graphical blocks called scripts. A script is a set of instructions that controls the action that occurs on the computer. You can write computer code by snapping together blocks, much like building bricks or pieces of a puzzle. The blocks are designed to fit only in ways that make sense. This eliminates the annoying error messages that can cause frustration when learning to write computer programs. To create a program in Scratch, you just drag and drop the blocks to make something happen to an object on the screen. Scratch is great for beginners, but still provides a complex environment that also allows you to design more complicated projects. This is the ideal combination for getting started in programming, while still providing a challenging environment for Scratch experts.
In this computer science project, you will get to make your own animated greeting card. You will decide what the card will say and which pictures you want to add. In Scratch, the pictures are called sprites. You will write scripts to make your sprites do all sorts of things. For example, you could write scripts that make a character jump, a hat spin, or a word rock back-and-forth. Once you get started with programming, you'll find there are limitless possibilities for what you can do.
Terms, Concepts and Questions to Start Background Research
Bibliography
These resources will introduce you to Scratch:
For more information about electronic cards, visit:
Materials and Equipment
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Note: This programming science project is best described by the engineering design process, as opposed to the scientific method. You might want to ask your teacher whether it's acceptable to follow the engineering design process for your project before you begin. You can learn more about the engineering design process on the Science Buddies Engineering & Programming Project Tips page. |
Experimental Procedure
| Figure 2.This script makes the sprite to which it is attached spin when the green flag is clicked. In this case, the sprite will spin 15 degrees counterclockwise a total of 50 times and then stop. | ![]() |
| Figure 3. In this script, the sprite spins when the spacebar is pushed. This is similar to the script above, but uses the space bar, rather than the green flag, to activate the script. | ![]() |
| Figure 4. This script will make the sprite to which this is attached grow and shrink rapidly five times, like a beating heart. | ![]() |
| Figure 5. This is a script example that makes the sprite rock back and forth. | ![]() |
| Figure 6. This script makes the sprite 1) ask a question, 2) wait for an answer, 3) change its look ("costume") repeatedly if the answer is "yes." In this case, the "costumes" are two pictures of a girl—once while she's in the air and once while she's on the ground. When the pictures are shown alternately, this script makes the girl appear to be jumping up and down. | ![]() |
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| Figure 7. New sprites. There are three buttons for new sprites. From left to right, they are: paint a new sprite, choose a new sprite from file, or get a surprise sprite. If you use the "choose a new sprite from file" button, you can either select from sprites that came with the Scratch program, or import an image you have on your computer. |
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| Figure 8. Click on Costumes to edit your sprites. You can name them using the text box, shown here with the red circle around it. |
For general advice on engineering presentations, see the Science Buddies page Engineering and Programming Project Tips.
Variations
Credits
David B. Whyte, PhD, Science Buddies
Last edit date: 2010-03-31 12:00:00
If you like this project, you might enjoy exploring careers in Computer Science.
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