e-Learning Physics Unit 5, Activity 4: Exploring Scratch – a simple animation program
Animation in science: medical physics and laser treatment
Activity 4: Exploring Scratch – a simple animation program
In the last three activities you have used Macromedia Flash, which can be difficult to learn but the results are excellent.
In this activity, you will explore Scratch. MIT has developed a simple animation program called Scratch, which can be downloaded from: MIT scratch See Figure 1.
Figure 1 Scratch animation
This is a sprite-driven animation system, which is very easy to use but limited in that you have to use the items on the system. It includes sounds as well as animation sprites and you can import pictures and sounds as well.
However, it would be possible to set a project for students to do which uses this programme if you change the focus of the animation. Instead of trying to get an animation that consists of wave forms (an abstract concept anyway), why not get the students to produce an animation that tells the story of a laser? For example, instead of energy levels why not have the cat (or any other sprite) climbing a ladder to a higher energy level? After all, the cat needs energy to do this, just as the laser needs the energy from the flashlamp to pump in the energy to move the electrons from one energy level to another. Other analogues for this story could involve the same idea of the cat changing colour as it moves to a higher energy level (and visa versa).
Use this very simple step-by-step guide to complete a simple animation and additional support and guidance provided at scratch wiki website.
This animation software is much more user friendly than Macromedia Flash and can produce some effective animations, which may encourage students to try out the more sophisticated software. The main point is to get students involved with the topic so that, in order to understand how to make an animation, they understand the science behind the topic in greater detail than if they just read about it. The Support section has a useful Getting Started section, which takes the user through the initial stages of getting the software to work.
This support section also has a video tutorial section; and a translation section (gives Arabic, Dutch, French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Turkish and Ukrainian).
There is also a Reference section, FAQs, a Help guide and even a section showing how to connect sensors to Scratch animations!
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