Reflecting+Sprites

Emilie Carrison - Ball State University - MATH 330 Spring 2013  __** __Reflecting Sprites Program Video__ **__

Working with Scratch really taught me how to problem solve, and I felt free to experiment and make mistakes. Before I settled with my final program I had tried numerous long stacks of code, but my sprite would never end up where I wanted it. A lot of trial and error and then analysis came into play with this program, but with the Scratch interface being so user friendly and fun it did not seem like work to me. I wanted to do it, and it was enjoyable to see how much I could make these sprites do by entering different directions. My program was very simple but a lot of time went into that small stack of code, a lot of time and reverse thinking. I had never coded before this project, and the simple use of blocks to snap together pieces of code was very helpful for me. Scratch taught me how to code, but in a way that just seemed like a strategic game! I think this program has a lot of potential for classroom use and it really models the learning processes of problem solving, troubleshooting, and analysis. 

For my scratch program I created a program that reflects an object across either the x or y axis in the coordinate plane. I created two sprites for the program, and one sprite only reflects across the x-axis while the second sprite only reflects across the y-axis. To actually perform the reflection you drag the sprite to a desired location on the coordinate plane, then click the sprite to reflect the image. The reflection over the x-axis is the same x coordinate of the original, but the y coordinate is multiplied by -1 to make it the opposite. For the y-axis reflection the x coordinate is multiplied by -1 and the y coordinate remains the same. I had a few different math concepts in the program such as horizontal flips, vertical flips, the coordinate grid and the multiplication operation.