Engineering: Home Away from Home

Badjelly the Witch animation

 Kia ora everyone!

I'm so excited! One of my classes at Riverdale have been reading the book 'Badjelly the Witch' by Spike Milligan.  This was one of my favourite books when I was a child and I remember MY teacher reading it to ME when I was about the same age!

We drew lots of pictures of witches when I was a kid, but we never had the chance to make animations because the technology just didn't exist.

 

 I had so much fun making this animation.  I really struggled to get the angle of my characters right... it was hard to make it look like they were actually IN the picture and it was tricky to get them to turn around.  I know from the story, that Tim and Rose are really worried about Lucy, so it was frustrating not to be able to change their facial expressions to help my viewers understand that's how they are feeling.  When I remake this animation, I'd like to create my own 'Tim' and 'Rose' so that I can change their expressions as they move through the animation.  

I really had to persevere a lot when I was making this, as sometimes I got tired of duplicating slides.  It must be so so so time consuming for animators that make our motion picture movies to get animations done! They use far more frames per second, and they create all the pictures themselves!

Which part of my animation do you like the best? Have you made an animation before?

My Scratch Background

I was learning to make a Scratch Background.  We used code blocks to give us the instructions.

I used texture to help me.

I added a pink fluffy house and used leaf texture and wood texture to help create my tree.  Lastly I added some porcupines using png and then used the format options to recolour them!

My favourite part to create was the road! It was quite a challenge!  What background would you create if you could make one?

Insane Music Machines Reflection 1

We were learning to
I really enjoyed
It was easy to
It was hard to
Next time I will

Insane Music Machines: Reflection 1

We were learning to

My animation about life in the trenches

We were learning about creating animations about things we are interested in.  I've been reading Bill Bryson's Book ' A Really Short History of Nearly Everything'.  He mentioned life in the trenches in the sea!  I loved learning about all the creatures that live there.
I found it easy to find a texture for my fish that I really liked.
I found it hard to create my own background, because I wanted to make it look real.
I really enjoyed using Talltweets to make a GIF.
Next time I need to put more effort into creating a background that actually looks like the trenches.

My Scratch Game about Quality Blogging.

We have been learning how to create games on Scratch that show movement.
I enjoyed using the code blocks to get my sprite (character) to move.  
I found it easy to choose a character and add the code blocks.
I found it hard to find a way to stop my sprite from disappearing when it walks off the edge of the page.
Next time I will add more code to get my dinosaur to have a conversation with my readers about blogging, because at the moment my game isn't teaching anyone anything.

Instructions:

Click the green flag to start.  Use the up, down, left and right arrow keys on your keyboard to make the dinosaur walk.  

Next, I want to make it so that when it walks, and when he touches different items in the screen, it teaches us different cybersmart blogging ideas.  What do you think would be a great point to teach people about?