By the end of this session each group had successfully got their spaceship to fly across the screen. They had all worked out how to change the speed of the animation and we talked about how we could use a variable to store the time for the delay so that if we wanted to make changes in future we only needed to change the variable and not each individual value. They were all familiar with using variable in this way and seemed pleased at this additional efficiency.
I was also a little dissatisfied with this end of particular module of the project. The only thing that changes between the different arrays that represent each frame of the animation is the x,y coordinates of the pixels, and they just increment by one each time It seemed to me to be a great opportunity to use a loop!
So I'd prepared a simple challenge sheet to show how to use loops in Arduino and relate it back to some of the loops the children were familiar with in Scratch.
This is quite tricky to implement and even the most accomplished coders were struggling to work out exactly how to do it. It was a shame that the session ended because I think a couple were close to figuring it out. I'll take them through one way of doing it next time.
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