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Monday 23 February 2015

Using Hopscotch to Create Story Animations

I have been spending a huge amount of time with Hopscotch on the iPad in the last few days. It would seem that an obsession is growing...

As you can see from some of my earlier posts, I do like to play around with Scratch to create fun little games and projects, and if I'm honest, I hadn't really used Hopscotch much since hearing about it a couple of years ago now. Then I saw a link to one of their YouTube videos:


After watching it, I immediately wanted to give it a try! With my Scratch experience safely tucked under my belt, I ventured into the wonderful world of Hopscotch!

So obsessed am I, that I have created three YouTube videos so far! Each one has progressively become more and more elaborate. 'The Magic Minecraft Pencil' even became a full animation piece. Here are my three videos in a playlist:



This really is a great app, and perfectly introduces children of primary age to coding. It is very easy to create something, and that something may be a simple animation or even a hugely complex game. I would aim this app at children in key stage 2 as there are other apps like Scratch Jr and Kodable that I would give to key stage 1 and Early Years first. That's not to say Hopscotch couldn't be used at all in those phases, of course!

I always like to look for cross curricular links in all of my teaching, and creating animations in Hopscotch could very easily support children in the writing of short stories or even non-fiction writing (instructions perhaps!) Children could either create the Hopscotch story scene first and use that as a stimulus to write their story. Or, they couldn't create the story first and then try to bring it to life in Hopscotch.

Happy Hopscotching!

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