Click the green flag Answer the questions Prepare to take a little trip
I use the "ask..." and "answer" blocks quite often, so It took me a while to think of what to do today. Ultimately I was inspired by an idea one of my students had. She used a Scratch project to gather input from others about different kinds of dragons to draw. I use the "ask..." block to get the user's name and location. I save this information as variables and the program responds, kind of like a chatbot. One of the things I am missing most about the current situation is traveling, and I have spent a lot of time during lockdown looking at pictures from old trips. So the project invites the user to go on a little daydream about going some place. I only put in 3 choices to visit, because time. The user types the name of the place and then answers 2 questions that ask for a feeling and an adjective. All of that is stored as variables as well. When the questions are over, a broadcast checks which location the user typed and switches to the corresponding background. The background change event makes various sprites appear and do their thing. That also makes the narrator speak using the feeling and adjective provided by the user. This was a fun project, but it had more moving pieces than I usually employ with the "ask..." block. I sketched the flow of the program out on paper and check marked the parts as I coded and tested them. I like this as an example of using the "ask..." block to share with students. They often confuse it with the "say..." block and are frustrated when the program pauses waiting for an input from the user. My favorite thing about this project is the animating I did for each background/location. I would like to add another thing to each background, but that will be for the next iteration. I also think I will do the next version of this using pictures from my own travels.
