Michael's Scratch Assignments:

Part 1 of 5:

Watch the getting started lessons on one of these two sites:

Learn Scratch (Scratch 1) at  http://learnscratch.org/scratch-1. The topics in these lessons are:

Lesson 1: Movement and sound
Lesson 2: Repeat blocks and start and stop
Lesson 3: Changing color and using key presses to control stuff
Lesson 4: Making Sprites.  You'll also want to watch my video on using sprites from other picture files
Lesson 5: Make a sprite speak (typed words on screen)
Lesson 6: Image effects--I think these are kind of unnecessary, but I think you'll think they are cool
Lesson 7: Add sound (built in sounds). Let me know if you want help with recording a sound (pretty easy) or importing a sound (either easy or tricky depending on what format the sound is in)
Lesson 8: Putting sounds and movement together to make a sprite "dance"

Official Scratch website stuff:

Read and do all of the things in the Getting Started manual: http://info.scratch.mit.edu/sites/infoscratch.media.mit.edu/files/file/ScratchGettingStartedv14.pdf

Watch the video tutorials: http://info.scratch.mit.edu/Video_Tutorials

Assignment: make a Scratch program with some sprites that move and/or change costumes, and there is sound.  E-mail it to me.

Part 2 of 5:

Look at these 3 Scratch projects that have different backgrounds and/or have sprites talking:

Conversation
Scenes
Slideshow

Read these instructions for useful commands for that kind of project

Assignment: make something similar.  It would be especially cool if you could do one like the Scenes example because that might get us close to making a video game type thing later.

OK--3 more projects to go. Here are some ideas I've been thinking about:

•  I've found instructions for making a maze or a pac-man like game, and that sounds like a good project.  I think I'll have you do that for project #3.  After that I don't know...
• Pong is a possibility. 
• Making one of those games where you have to catch falling objects could be cool--you learn event handlers in that which would be useful to know. 
• Learning how to make your sprite draw geometric shapes is a good thing--that could be another project.
• I found a reference to someone having their students make an RPG in Scratch, but I couldn't access the lessons ;(.  Mabe we could do a small RPG anyway as a project.
• This guy has a ton of projects (including the maze/pac-man instructions) http://www.nebomusic.net/scratch.html
• the learnscratch site has 2 other courses (with 24 and 32 lessons respectively).  We could totally do just Scratch 2 and that would count for a project or 2. On the other hand, actually making games sounds like more fun.