We are having a blast hosting webinars with micro:bit this month to celebrate Scratch Month! Last week, Katie and Colleen shared some mashup ideas for inventing with Makey Makey and micro:bit. They came back this week to share more ideas for combining Scratch coding with your curriculum! 

Musical Mash-up Activity 

Katie shared a great project called, "Help Pete find his Beat" with Scratch that combined micro:bit and Makey Makey. Visit Katie's blog for a full tutorial on making a sock bunny Pete, a musical Makey Makey dance pad, and super easy micro:bit glove! 

Colleen shared two project ideas based on this Scholastic Story Starter site. Both Scratch projects are based on a Makey Makey / micro:bit power-glove invention. (Make your own instructions for the glove here!)

Create a Story with Makey Makey micro:bit Power-glove

One project is to have students create their own story starter randomizer (here is her example in Scratch.) For this project, students would create a sprite for each spinning story element and then create a "costume" inside each sprite to create an easy way to randomly spin words. When a key is pressed by the Makey Makey, it stops the story element from spinning. 

To make your own:

• Create a "Genre" sprite
• Create a descriptive sprite
• Create a character sprite (for this just choose random sprites as each costume)
• Create a "action" or "problem" sprite

The code for this is pretty simple. Use the micro:bit extension for the "When tilted" hat and have the code "repeat until" an arrow key is pressed. Hook up your Makey Makey to the key press of your choice. Repeat this code for each sprite and change the tilt and key press if desired! 

Monster Mash with Makey Makey and micro:bit

For the second project, Colleen shared a monster mash-up idea based on the book Myth Match: A Fantastical Flipbook of Extraordinary Beasts (see example in Scratch.) 

Here is a pdf to download to help students with the writing aspect for their own Monster Mash Scratch project! Full Guide for this project will be on our "how to" page shortly!

Code it in Scratch

The code for this one is pretty simple too! You are combining the When micro:bit tilted" hat with a "repeat until" key pressed block to have the sprite rotate to the next costume until a key is pressed.

To make your costumes, create a new costume from the "costumes" tab. Pick an animal that can be matched up with other animals. You'll have a front half sprite and a back half sprite.

Insert a text box and write your text for the whole character. 

Divide your character in half with the selection box, and make sure to "ctrl c" to copy (or command c).

Once you've copied the selection, go to your "front half" sprite and choose to paint a new costume.

Then paste the selection you copied from the previous step! Make as many front half and back half monsters that you want! We'd love to see them! If you make a monster mash project, please add it to this studio.