Hailey and I worked together on this project together. It took us some time to come up with an idea that we were both interested in. We decided on basing our game on someone who is interested in art deciding on a major. I feel like a lot of people who want to focus on visual arts struggle to make that decision because they are constantly told they won’t make it in life. It is something I questioned earlier on, but ultimately I am really excited to become a teacher and I know that I can still work as an artist too. We wanted to reflect on how people always have something to say on life decisions.

We started with compiling ideas for our decisions and then Hailey began drawing each of our sprites as I started to prototype some coding. Initially the sprites were drawn out for planning purposes because our original planning page was fairly messy, but we liked the designs and tried to figure our the best way to upload them. We tried using Photoshop, but we both had a hard time with it and decided to use Scratch. Hailey and I had both spent a while using the design features for our sprites for our last project so it made things a lot easier. As she uploaded those I had time to work on the background drawings since we could not be in Scratch at the same time. Hailey also did some prototyping by filling in the backgrounds as different colors to sort out the coding before the backgrounds were finished.

I feel that often people second guess their decisions in life, especially when deciding on a major, because you are essentially guiding yourself towards a career that you are expected to hold for the rest of your life. It is not an easy decision to be made. With every choice their was an option to rethink and go back. However, there were consequences in that if you went back and switched your major, you would end up with less money at the end. We wanted to make sure that each outcome involved art somehow to show that your decisions do not have to limit the things you enjoy.

I added a song that I recorded on my guitar. Then I added my voice over top as the comments coming from outsiders. I tried to keep them as accurate as possible to how people often respond. I also really wanted to apply our GIF project to this and so I tried adding that but ended up having to add the backdrops and code them to look like GIFS because scratch does not allow that.

Something I learned by working with a partner, was timing our work to meet the limitations of Scratch. It was also interesting to learn how other people went about picking their major.

1. How does this relate (or not) to your prior experience of art and art ed?
2. How might you apply this in your classroom?

I don’t feel like in terms of technology aspects this related to prior experiences. STEAM was not something at all used when I was in high school. I also think it is interested that I have had prior experience learning Scratch in middle school, but was never asked to use my own art or create my own sounds. I think it would have been fun to be able to expand this way.

I don’t feel I would use this in my classroom, at least not as a partner project because of the way Scratch is set up. I think also the way we were forced to distribute the work gave all of us different experiences. I think Scratch also came with more limitations among that, but I do think it was worthwhile to learn basic coding.