smalldevs

We are happy to announce that our mouse Franky debuts on our YouTube channel @smallDevs . In the first episode, he will try to do a TikTok dance with his dad. P.S. Don't forget to click Subscribe if you like our buddy.

In the real life we are constantly making different decision based on different factors. For example, making a decision based on weather:  if there will be raining I'll stay at home, otherwise I'll play outside . I guess that without any problems you could give some other examples making decisions based on various conditions. As you can see, every of these examples rely on a piece of information that will let us figure out whether condition (is it raining?) is fulfilled or not.  If there is a mess in my room I have to clean it up If I am hungry I have a quick snack. If I am sick I will stay in bed Similarly in programming - to make our program smarter, we let it decide how to act if certain situations. In Scratch we have if ... then and if ... then ... else command blocks which can be translated to the humans speach as in following example: To make our example way more colorful, lets move to the magical world of Franky the Mouse. I have provided you with a file containing a ...

Do you remember the last time you held a school bag? People all over the world know why it was invented. We use it to carry things like books or notebooks from one place to another. If you're wondering what the variable meaning is, you can imagine it as a school bag. It's like a container or a place where you can store your data. Let's use our buddy Franky to show you how to deal with variables in Scratch. Go to Costumes and copy the franky-mouse costume. We can call the new one franky-mouse-mouth . Now we need to add new variable in Scratch. Let’s go to Code section and click Variables button. In variables area we need to click Make a Variable button to add new one. We can name it clicksCounter . We will use it to track the number of clicks on Franky. Our new variable clicksCounter has been added to the variables section. Now...

Let's start out journey!   As every story, this one also has its beginning. Here we will show you the gate to the powerful tool that will let you create your own magical worlds. As a first step we are going to briefly introduce you to Scratch working environment by exploring different sections of Scratch editor. To create animated story or the game you must add instruction so that actors that plays on the stage knows what to do. Actors In Scratch actors are represented by sprites, which ares pictures displayed on the screen, that follows your commands. By default Scratch starts with a cat sprite for every new project but we will create our own here in the next lessons.. Area on the right bottom part of screen is called sprite pane. Here you can add the sprite, remove the sprite and browse all the sprites added to your project. Sprites added to the project are visible on the stage. Stage On the stage we can see result of the sprite following computer program build of comman...

Last time we drew Franky in Scratch. We learned to use different shapes and manipulate their form. Today we'll go a step further and try to breathe more life into our buddy.  What if we gave him the opportunity to wink at someone?  Looks good? Let's get started! Our first step is to create a copy of the existing Franky's costume. Right click on the franky-mouse costume and choose duplicate. Same copy will be created. We need to change its name to franky-mouse-blink . Now it's time for a secret. To simulate the blink of an eye. We need to change the shape of the eyes in our new costume. Thanks to this, we will be able to programmatically switch the costume from non-blinking to blinking once we reach the coding part. Let's select Franky's eye and resize it vertically to make it appear that the eye is closed. We repeat the same operation for the other eye. We finally got to the coding part. Coding in Scratch is similar to Lego blocks, where you take different plas...

Let's meet our hero! Before we start learning different aspects of coding, we need to do something special. If we try to imagine that our journey is a kind of movie, then we must have an actor who will play the main role in our performance. We'll start by creating our character in Scratch. Our final result will be the sum of the different geometric shapes that together will make up our actor. It's like putting on clothes before leaving the house. Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce you to… Franky the mouse . If you like it, we will go step by step to explain how to do it. Ready? Let's create a new project and go to the Costumes section. We need to enter the name of our new hero franky-mouse . Now the fun part begins. As we mentioned at the beginning, the magic lies in the use of various geometric shapes. Let's take a circle and resize it to get something similar to an egg. The next step will be to use the Reshape tool and change the bottom part of our buddy to ...