Programming "Small Moment" Stories with Scratch Jr.

Students adapted a Small Moment story they had written into a Scratch Jr. animation. First, students created backgrounds. Scratch Jr. has some backgrounds to choose. Students were shown how to modify a background or even create one from scratch. It's a good idea to emphasize that a background should only contain items that will not be animated. Scratch Jr. allows up to four backgrounds in a project. Next, students added characters. A character can be a person, animal or object (anything that is animated). Characters can also be modified or created from scratch.

Each character must be animated independently. A useful tip is to broadcast messages to sequence or synchronize actions, either from the same character or between different characters. Another useful tip is make sure you are putting the end action block after the last action in each section. Otherwise, actions or audio can get cut short.

Sharing is projects is a little tricky since Scratch Jr. doesn't have an export to video option. Only a project project file can be shared, which can only be played back by a device with Scratch Jr. This is probably because the program includes interactive programming blocks that would be lost if exported to video. We tried making videos by playing back a project on one iPad and recording it with another. However, the audio suffered significantly. There was already classroom ambiance in the original projects and recording the final product with another iPad doubled the classroom ambiance. To get around this problem, we used a rather complicated system which involved recording the Airplay stream with a computer program called Reflector 2.

Although the audio and video quality were much better recording the Airplay stream, the setup makes this solution very difficult. In the future, I will probably just upload the project files to Google Drive and instruct parents to download Scratch Jr. on their device to view their child's project. Scratch Jr. is now available on several mobile platforms, including iOS, Android, and ChromeOS.