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Super hectic past 2 weeks. Been travelling for personal reasons, plus many guests at house.

Prep for Scratch

As promised to the students, I started preparing to build the classic chrome dino game in scratch while teaching them core concepts:

I spun up claude code and asked it to find how the dino game works, mostly for the exact assets: the images and sounds. As I had guessed, there was a sprite containing all the images:

Smartly Claude used playwright in order to download the exact assets. I instructed it to convert this into individual images (slicing) to be imported to scratch using the JS code of chrome itself! It worked like magic and it was time to actually program it.

Time to Scratch!

We finally started with Scratch, which is Week 0 at CS50. I started with a long lecture on the basics of scratch: blocks, scene, costume, etc. The core approach was to create parallels between flow charts (which they have been learning for sometime now) and scratch blocks.

Then we started building the dino game piece by piece. I have shared 4 worksheets for them to follow along and build simple (logic) games.

Till now, we have been able to make the dino walk (costume change), jump (along with “gravity” which brings it back to ground), and made the background move.

Math Math Math

Since I was not available much, Vishwajeet took more mathematics classes and also started giving them practice worksheets.

Exams

We are planning for some tests and a 1-on-1 review. I feel it is much needed now since I am unable to judge individual performance yet, just a group vibe.