https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/442913577/ 

My partner was Lauren Kimball and we both took part in the drawings and doing the coding for this scratch game. In our design thinking process, we were thinking about things we are both experiencing right now. We decided that having the game be centered around our homework overload versus what we could be doing, would be a fun idea. We planned the backdrops to be different settings of where we do our homework. We used the think bubbles to show what we would rather be doing during the time we are doing our homework. The choice it whether to do homework or to get out and do other things. Most of the time we end up doing the homework, because we have to get it done before the due dates. At first, figuring out the coding was a little bit difficult and there was a lot of trial and error involved in this game for the both of us. Each time I would add something to the coding, I would have to check and see if it worked. I definitely learned a lot more about scratch through this process because there was a lot of figuring things out.

Through this process, I learned that scratch really isn’t a partner savvy platform. It was very frustrating to not be able to work together on a project that was meant to be worked on together. Being that there are so many programs that support multiple users, I don’t understand why Scratch isn’t feasible for it. It would definitely be so much more of an enjoyable project if we were in person and able to work together and figure things out together. There is so much disconnect when trying to work with other people through video chat. During this project, I learned a lot more about Scratch and the different functions just though working and trying different things. Overall, the project forced me to learn different coding than I have tried before. I also found that Scratch forces the user to do a lot of troubleshooting, but if I kept at it, I eventually figured it out.

This relates to prior experience of art and art education because often times, students are encouraged to work together to figure out different solutions to given projects. We were also required to design a game and we used our own line drawings for the backgrounds. Using both technology and drawing for the backgrounds was a fun way of breaking up this project. It was nice to be able to stop coding for a little bit to draw another background. Combining our own work into the game made it a bit more interactive for us. As art educators, we want to create projects that are both interactive and creative.

I might apply this activity in the art classroom by having students think about things that are going on in their lives at the moment and designing a game that reflects these things. It could be a symbolic choice game where students think of things that are significant parts of their lives and design the game based upon that. Students could also create a choice based game using different things like cooking versus baking, or sports versus video games to allow students to share things they are interested in.