Day Scratch: It's Raining It's Pouring

Today we learned about a new program, its called Scratch.  Unlike the Pico program and the PicRDS programs, scratch allows for non-physical reactions.  Like if  a button is pressed, on screen a cat will jump or something.  So its a little different from what we've previously messed with.  It was oodles of fun figuring out the different possibilities with this program.

This wasn't the only thing we did in class though.  We also learned about making our own 'sensors.'  We had alligator clips and craft materials and our imaginations.  Our sensor was looking for conducticity.  We had three different pieces of felt soaked with varying amounts of water.  Each piece had a different amount of conductivity.  The dry felt being the least conductive, the drenched felt the most conductive, and the third damp felt was a medium conductive. 

One clip was tapped to the foil wrapped plate and the other clip was attached to the fuzzy pipe cleaner pen.  When the pen is touched to the varying degrees of water soaked felt, it will receive different readings.  To make a small illustration of this, we created a program so that we had a cat, that was walking along and over head he had some clouds.  If the pen was touching the dry felt, there would be white fluffy clouds.  If the pen touched damp felt, the couds turned grey, and if it was the drenched felt, the clouds would be black thunderheads.


Our cat had clouds follow over his head.  Below is a picture of our cat in the sun.