In my last blog post, I introduced a #WAOTL series where you and your students might experience computer science by using Scratch to create and code an interactive experience with bioluminescent characters from the children's book "Whose Afraid of the Light" by Anna McGregor.
Although Scratch does offer opportunities to paint digital drawings of the characters, I love including students' hand-drawn art into Scratch projects. There are several ways to go about this depending on the tools you have access to. If you are looking for a step by step workflow for bringing in your student art work into Scratch projects, this post is for you.
If you have your own workflow for importing art into Scratch projects, you can skip this post and proceed to the next post in this series .
STEP 1: Create Hand Drawn Art Work
I ask students to use the unlined back of index cards to draw and color a picture of one of the characters in the book. (You can also use cardstock cut to size). Make sure to include a yellowish color for the part of the character that glows in the dark. It's also important that there is a sharp contrast between the white background and the drawing. One way to achieve this is to outline the drawing with a black sharpie or a bright bold colored sharpie. Here are a couple drawings from young learners from Grade K and Grade 1.
STEP 2: Create a Digital Copy with Transparent Background
The next step is to take pictures of the art work and remove the background. There are many ways to approach this. One way is to use some of the features of your phone's photo apps that automatically remove the background. But since it's impossible to know what phone or apps teachers have access to, I'm going to use a workflow that works no matter what type of phone or tablet you have.
1. Use the browser in your phone (or tablet) to go to the website remove.bg
(I use this so often that I've created a shortcut to this website on my phone)
2. From the remove.bg website, click on
Upload
Choose Take Photo
Snap Photo
(Carefully try to only capture the white background around your character)
Select Use Photo
(The background should disappear)
Click on Download
Click on Save Image
You now have a digital photo of a hand drawn photo image with a transparent background on your phone.
STEP 3: Transfer photos of art work from phone to your computer
You can use several methods to transfer these images to your computer before uploading them to Scratch. If your school uses Google Apps then I suggest using the Google Drive App on your phone to upload the pictures in a Google Drive folder that can be shared with your students.
.png)
.png)
--Share the folder with your students so they can download the pictures they need individually .
- Click on the three dots.. next to folder.
- Select Share.
- Change General Access from Restricted to Anyone with the Link.
- Copy Link.
- Share the link with students (either in Google Classroom, via email, or other method)
- Download all the pictures on your teacher computer, and upload them to a Scratch project that your students can remix.
--Download the folder of images on your teacher computer and add them as sprites to Scratch project that students can access and REMIX.
.png)
If your school allows students access to Google Photos, you can also create a Google Photos Album to transfer images from phone to computer for students to access. Be sure to check first because many districts restrict use of Google Photos for students course.
Of course if you have access to different tools, (i.e. Air Drop) use the method that works best for you and your students based on available tools and age of students.
Now it's time to bring those images into a SCRATCH project.
There are some options depending on the age of your students and the method you chose above.
Option 1: For younger students, you might download all the artwork on your teacher computer. You can then upload all those images at once as individual sprites on ONE Scratch project. The students can then REMIX that project and TRASH the sprites they don't want.
.png)
.png)
Option 2. For older students, you can share the link to the Google Drive folder of images and they can independently DOWNLOAD only their images onto their computer or Chromebook, then UPLOAD the images as a sprite in their own Scratch projects.
Here's a video recap of all the steps above,
plus a few extra tips on how to create shortcuts on your phone.
These steps are also included as part of the Challenge 1 teacher guide . The rest of the Challenge 1 steps will be described in details in the next blog post.
Lucie's Notes: Although this process is more consuming that the rest of the steps in this series, I'm confident you will see that importing student hand drawn art is worth the time investments. Once the students start working with their own drawings, they are hooked to learn to code them into a fun experience. There is something about the act of creation that motivates the students to persevere through challenges of learning a new skill (like computer science). Motivation is KING in teaching and learning coding or any subject!
Another thought I had was that older students (Grades 4-6) often act as reading buddies for younger learners. Why not have your older reading buddy import a younger student's art work into a Scratch project that becomes an interactive experience for their reading buddy. Older students now have an authentic audience for their coding project as they gain computer science skills inspired by literature.
If you give this a try, please reach out and share. I hope these tips give you the confidence to give it a try.
In the next post we'll show you how to create and code a Glow effect to the sprites to simulate the bioluminescence found in the children's book - "Are You Afraid of the Light"
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
No comments:
Post a Comment