Making Interactive Art from Scratch
The second stage of our workshops at Hunter’s Bar Junior School involved taking digital images of the characters, that the children had designed, onto the school computers. We then introduced each class to the Scratch programming environment where they were able to create animation and visual effects.
About Scratch.
It’s FREE! You can download the programme and share your work online at: http://scratch.mit.edu/
Scratch is a great tool for children to start learning about how interactive media is made. They can quickly create something that looks a lot like the interactive games they play on Club Penguin or the CBBC website. Scratch allows just about anyone to program their own games and interactive art using a versatile graphical ‘object oriented’ environment, which is like programming with Lego. This minimises the possibility of typing errors and uses visual themes of colours and shapes to categorise instructions and functions.
