The bear is late. Where do you think the bear is?
Today I explored a big number of ideas, coded with a very small number of blocks, and reflected through a huge number of words! Initially I wanted to make something about the moon phases, like a calculator where you insert the date and tells you what the moon look like on that day. I didn't know how to calculate it so I checked on google and I found code in other programming languages that I didn't have the time to translate into Scratch. So I searched directly on Scratch and I found many amazing projects. From the notes in a project by @pastense I learned about the Julian Day, which corresponds to the number of days since January 1st 4714 BC, and is used in many astronomical algorithms. Then I noticed another amazing project by my friend @cyberparra, that showed the moon phase for the current day. I thought of adding a small feature of asking for the hemisphere you are in, because I've recently discovered that the moon appears "flipped" upside down between the north and south hemisphere (this blows my mind!) I started working on it but then I had to leave and when I came back I wasn't very motivated to continue the remix. Looking at other projects in the studio, I loved the projects "Say their name" by @pkirschmann and "Black Lives Matter" by @incantotoscano. I've found them super powerful and they inspired me to make a project about a cause. It's been a couple of days that I wanted to make a project to raise awareness around Patrick Zaki, a 28-year old Egyptian human-rights activist who used to study in Bologna (my city) and is currently unlawfully detained and being tortured in Egypt. I read more about his story and started thinking of a project, but again I had to do something else and I decided to postpone the project to another time. Finally, I received a sweet email from @MissMissShelly who suggested me to look at @MEStech "Random Idea Generator" from day 6, and that got me unstuck! Her project generates two random sprites and a background as a prompt for a story. For me, it was about a ghost and a bear in wetland. As I saw the ghost (who was the main character of many of my other projects in this getting unstuck season) I knew it was the right prompt for today! So I played a bit with the "ask" block and I was wondering if the answer could be read also by other sprites. That gave me the idea of the bear using the answer instead of the ghost, and after trying a couple of different questions I realized it was very funny to make a guessing game where you always guess right! :) As usual, it took me hours of explorations to come up with the idea, only 5 minutes(*) to code, and more hours to reflect on my process. But I think it makes sense because it's in the explorations and the reflections that I'm learning the most. In the exploration for this project I learned about the moon phases, astronomical algorithms, racial injustice, activism, human rights, and much more. As @mres would say: I was "coding to learn", more than "learning to code". And only through these (insanely long) reflections I was able to make my own learning visible to myself and to others. As @karenb often says: "there is no learning without reflection". Remembering my (apparently random) wanderings and organizing my thoughts in a shareable form helped me to give a meaning to those moments, and to understand that I was not wasting time. In the same way, hopefully these reflections can help others to see that there is much more than a couple of simple blocks, a ghost, and a funny bear in this project. As a friendly fox once said to a little prince: "what is essential is invisible to the eye". As an educator, I hope to keep improving my ability to see what's behind the projects that my students share and help them to train their own eyes to see what they are learning and what is essential, in their work and in themselves. (*Edit: after seeing @MrQuentin funny bear animation I couldn't resist and came back to the project and worked a lot on the bear entrance animation and added the sounds and final winks.. so coding took me way more than 5 minutes! :))
