We have been growing our understanding of the Digital Curriculum through using the coding platform Scratch to tell stories. Below is the story important to our local area and national history of 'Kupe and the Giant Wheke' told by Kereru on Scratch - read more to see how we did this and the challenges we overcame.

Scratch works through giving 2D images (sprites) instructions through building blocks on the top of backdrops to produce animation. Although you cannot move specific parts of the images, e.g. make the mouth move when they are talking. Therefore it can look a little clunky if you aren't used to seeing Scratch projects before e.g. a waka sinking can move in three big jumps rather than gliding or an image of a Māori tribe glides as one big clump together, rather than them all walking separately. Despite these limitations, we still liked what we were able to make.

You can see the backdrops that we used throughout the video below in the images section - check the captions for more details. These were a mixture of the Scratch provided backdrops and Google Images uploaded and edited. Some of the backdrops required editing to make them appropriate for the context of the time e.g. removing buildings that wouldn't have been around in 1300 A.D. 

The building blocks are shown after the backdrops. There are many different categories of instructions such as motion (moving, direction changes), looks (speech, costume changes, size, hiding/showing), sounds (voice acting and background noise), events (how to start the game/story, change backdrop), control (wait time) and a few other features we are yet to discover. These blocks can be clicked and dragged into the middle coding space to form instructions that happen one after another. These can become quite complex and lengthy. Often you can encounter problems that take a while to fix and have creative solutions.

As we went through the story, we added new characters and backdrops along the way. The most fun part was adding voice acting to each of the characters. Many of them were voiced by multiple people in the class.

We enjoyed showing our learning through this digital medium and we hope you learn something knew about our history in New Zealand.

We had a lot of fun making this and it took us hours and hours to make. Click this link below here to see what we ended up making.

We are also happy to help any other class if they would like some buddies to show them how to improve their using of Scratch and coding - just ask us and we are happy to help.

Kupe and Te Wheke:
https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/705247226/

Kereru Class.