Computing

Our next few lessons have three aims:

To create and debug simple programs  

To use logical reasoning to predict the behaviour of simple programs  

To use technology purposefully to create digital content 

Over the next few weeks, we would like the children to create their own music playing program at home. This may sound very complicated but we will guide you through the programming aspect step by step and the children will love it! (You may like to try all of this out yourself without the children around first, although there's a good chance that they will pick it up and work it out very quickly once they get going!)

We are going to make our own music playing program, a bit like Tony-B, where you click different parts of the screen to make different noises. To start with, you can explore my program and see how it works.

Go to Scratch at https://scratch.mit.edu/ and click on the 'Create' option on the top toolbar. 

Delete the cat sprite in the bottom right hand corner by clicking on the dustbin.

Explain that we are going to start by choosing a backdrop for our program - do this by clicking on 'backdrops' on the top left hand side. 

Ask the children to look for a ‘stage’ in the backdrop library.  

Once a backdrop has been selected, it should look like this (with the backdrop that your child chose, obviously!):

Go to the Sprite library and choose a drum...

The drum will then appear on your backdrop in the top right hand corner.

What would we like to happen when we touch the drum? Talk to the children about the coloured menus and let them examine where they would find the one that says ‘when this sprite clicked’. (CLUE: It's under 'Events'.)

Drag a copy of this command into the middle 'script area.'

Now choose the sound that you’d like the drum to make from the sound library under the sound tab. 

You can explore changing the sound that is normally assigned to a Sprite using the button at the bottom left hand side and deleting the pre-assigned choice.

Now add the code that tells the program what to do when you click on the drum:

You can test your drum by clicking on it on the stage on the right hand side of the page. 

If it does not work, check the steps that you have used and make sure that the code is just two blocks, like the one above.

Save the project so far onto your computer so that we can return to it in the future. Make sure that the .sb2 file extension remains.