Scratch for Arduino (S4A) Project - A Food Detector

Here is a project to design a Food Detector - an interactive game that tries to identify the type of food among a few given food items.  It uses the Arduino's analog inputs to measure the resistance offered by different food items. I designed this lesson for our Grade 5 students, and taught it last week at school. The inspiration for this lesson came from the Pixelate game, that I found on the Arduino site. The class went really well, and the kids had fun playing detective with different fruits & vegetables.

Below is the formal lesson plan:

Aim

Different food items have different resistance/ conductance to electricity. Learn to use the analog sensors in the Arduino to identify different food items, with S4A (Scratch for Arduino) as the software development environment.

S4A (Scratch for Arduino) Project - Robot Car Part 2 - Indicator Lights

Continuing with the previous project of the keyboard controlled robot car and adding indicator lights to it... This is a really simple addition to the robot car, just a few LEDs to act as the car's indicator lights. And modifying the program to blink the LEDs on left/right turns and on reverse.

Additional materials for the indicator lights:

• 4 LEDs (preferably, 2 each in the same color)
• 4 Resistors
• Jumper wires as needed

Valentine's Day Greeting Card - programmed with Scratch

With Valentine's Day coming up, this week I decided to do a fun little Scratch project with my child's class - make animated Valentine's Day greeting cards. The lesson plan is meant to introduce the kids to the following concepts:

1. create animation effects by changing the size of a sprite
2. make clones/ copies of a sprite
3. position a sprite at a random location 
4. provide background music for the animation

I made this sample skeletal program to use as a starting point.

There are 4 sprites in my sample program - Heart Face, Greeting, Balloon, and Heart.