Scratch Animation Workshop
On Sunday, we welcomed Laurence and Brian to the Makespace Classroom as they conducted a special scratch workshop.
The event commenced with Laurence, who runs code club events in Edinburgh, explaining how we had managed to find a way to get basic sketches of characters onto Scratch software. He showed us a variety of images that he had created in the past, from humans to sheep, he had created a world of characters that could easily be imported.
The children were then given the task of using one of Lawrence’s characters, and developing them onto Scratch, while adding their very own personal touches along the way.
There were four key stages to the project; use inscape to turn a drawing into an electronic character; create a number of animation poses for the character; import it onto Scratch and write a simple code loop to ‘walk’ the character across the screen.
Lawrence told us the primary aim of the session was for the children to ‘learn new techniques’ which involved creating and filling shapes, importing images and making them opaque, creating arbitrary shapes with Bezier tools, adjusting corners/sides with Path tool, raising, lowering and rotating shapes and grouping/ungrouping particular objects.
As the afternoon progressed, the children, accompanied by their parents and other Makespace members, were able to feel at ease with the software and began to get creative when designing their characters.
We thank Lawrence and Brian for their time given on Sunday, and we hope that all the children who attended had a fantastic time!