“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” – Isaac Newton, 1676

Introduction

Building on other people’s work has been a long-standing practice in programming and has only been amplified by network technologies that provide access to a wide range of other people’s work. An
essential goal of creative computing is to support connections between learners through reusing and
remixing. The Scratch authoring environment and online community support young designers in this key computational practice by helping them find ideas and code to build upon, enabling them to create more complex projects than they could have created on their own.

This unit focuses on helping you develop your storytelling and remixing abilities through a variety of hands-on and off computer design activities, providing opportunities for you to work collaboratively and build on the creative work of others. You will discover new blocks and methods for programming
interactions between sprites and backdrops, culminating in a Pass It On project.

Characters Activity 1

By completing this activity, you will:

• Experiment with defining behaviors for characters using Scratch’s Make a Block feature.
• Gain more familiarity with the computational concepts of events and parallelism and the practice of
  experimenting and iterating.

See some examples: studio 475545

Link to Activity 1 

Time-driven programming

A computer programming paradigm, where the control flow of the computer program driven by a clock and often used in Real-time computing. There are many challenges due to what processes are happening on the computer. As you will see in the next activity, many learners struggled to get the timing right.

Broadcasting

An event-driven type of programming where the control flow of the computer program driven by events is often much easier to code.

Conversations Activity 2

By completing this activity, you will:

• explore two different strategies for synchronizing interactions between sprites (timing and broadcasting) by remixing a joke project
• develop greater familiarity with the computational concept of events and parallelism and the practice of reusing and remixing

Penguin Joke starter project

Link to Activity 2

Link to Clean Jokes For Kids

Scenes Activity 3

By completing this activity, you will:

• be able to create a project that experiments with changing backdrops, like a story with multiple scenes or a slideshow
• gain more familiarity with the computational concepts of events and parallelism and the practice of
  experimenting and iterating

Link to Scenes Studio 475550: A good example is “Ur-2.”

Link to Scenes Activity 3

Let’s pull it all together!

Story Time Activity 4

You have used many blocks of code at this point so it is time to to create a major project. It is story time.

In this activity you will:

• Create a Scratch project that tells a story focusing on characters, scene, plot, or whatever element
  excites you.
• Reuse or remix content by adding it to your story.
• Get creative and brainstorm ideas.
• Showcase your project to the Programming Studio.

You may work with a teammate or on your own.

Link to Story Time Activity 4