EXPRESSIVE ARTS - Computing & Coding

Pong is a table tennis–themed twitch arcade sports video game, featuring simple two-dimensional graphics, manufactured by Atari and originally released in 1972. It was one of the earliest arcade video games; it was created by Allan Alcorn as a keyboard training exercise.

Our pupils have been recreating this famous game within ‘Scratch’.

Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children and a coding language with a simple visual interface that allows young people to create digital stories, games, and animations.

Scratch promotes computational thinking and problem solving skills; creative teaching and learning; self-expression and collaboration; and equity in computing.

In Expressive Arts our pupils have learned the features of this coding language to create their own versions of the game ‘Pong’. By creating the on-screen graphics and coding instruction lines for each graphic, the pupils have been able to assign keyboard input controls to the on screen graphics!

Scratch Interface - Block Palette

The block palette is where the different script blocks are located. The different type of script blocks include: motion, control, looks, sensing, sound, operators, pen, variables.

Motion - controls the up, down, left, right, and rotation movement of the sprites.

Control - allows you to specify things such as what starts and stops your sprites, how you can move the object, conditional operators such as if/then and repetition.

Looks - affects the appearance of your sprite such as colour and costume.

Sensing - controls to sense if your sprite is touching the edge, another colour, another sprite, at a specific X or Y coordinate, the sound volume, etc.

Sound - control sounds, pitches, and volume.

Operators - Logic operators including tools to perform match functions, select a random number, greater than, less than, equal to, etc.

Pen - pen functions allows you to draw lines and objects on the stage.

Variables - create variables to hold numbers or text.