Now that your background moves and your character’s body appears to walk, let’s make your character actually be able to move around the screen.  

Click HERE for directions on how to move around the screen.

Next, Have your character jump onto platforms

Click HERE for Jumping directions.

What qualities do you look for when choosing your friends? Write a post in your blog about it…

or use Wordle to create a word cloud by clicking here.   Post the Wordle on your blog by taking a screenshot . Watch this tutorial to see how:

**EXTRA CREDIT:

Have you ever had a friend that changed and stopped having the qualities you look for in a friend?  Did you end the friendship or just keep it going?  What lessons did you learn from the experience?  Without using their real names, tell the story of what happened.

It’s time to put your inner artist to work!  Instead of having the Scratch cat do all our walking, let’s create our own walking character.  To help you draw, click on one of the images below:

Below is a tutorial on how to do it. Remember: YOUR DRAWINGS DO NOT HAVE TO BE PERFECT!

This semester we’ve been playing serious games (think: Ayiti, ICED, HIV/AIDS) in order to learn about important issues in a fun and interesting way.  Your job for the next few months is to create a serious game of your own.    In this assignment you will create several backgrounds for your game using SketchUp.   Below is a video tutorial  on how to create realistic backgrounds in SketchUp:

Once created, you’ll put your backgrounds into Scratch and have them scroll along while your character walks. Click HERE for the lesson.

Watch a clip from the movie A.I. by clicking HERE.  Next, answer the questions below in your blog:

1. Should roboticists (those who make robots) avoid making robots that think and feel like humans?  Why or why not?

2. Should some robots be given human rights?  For example, the right not to be tortured, to be allowed to marry, to be educated, and to be free to practice a religion?

Imagine this:  you are instant messaging with two “people”.  One of the people is human and the other is really a computer.  Can you tell the difference?

This is the question that a man named Alan Turing had in 1950.  He called this test– to see if humans could tell the difference between Man and Machine– The Turing Test.  So far, no machine has passed.  That said, ever year computers come closer and closer to passing the Turing Test.

Now it’s your turn to test some of the machines.  This is not exactly a Turing Test because there are no humans on the other end, but your job is to talk with two machines and figure out why you know they’re not human.

1. Click on each of these machines and have a conversation with them:

Splotchy

Cleverbot

2.  In your blog answer the following questions:

a) Did either of the machines come close to passing the Turing Test (did they seem human?)

b) What were some of the questions you asked Splotchy and Cleverbot?  What kind of questions were Splotchy and Cleverbot better at answering?

c) How do you think these computers program work? Why do you think it’s so hard to design a machine that passes the Turing Test?

These days, the Internet has makes it SO easy to find information on all sorts of subjects.  It has also made copying and pasting that information into class assignments a snap.   Unfortunately, copying and pasting words from the Internet (or books, magazines, etc.) is considered plagiarism.  Plagiarism is stealing other people’s ideas without giving them credit.  The only way to avoid plagiarizing is to give credit to the person or place you found the information.  Look at the slideshow below for more information.

Now, watch this episode of Adina’s Deck by clicking HERE

Finally,  answer the following questions in your blog:

1.  Give an example of when YOU (yes, you) plagiarized and explain what you could have done differently.

2.  Go to Techbrarian’s Student Blogs page and find a quote from your favorite student blogger.  Copy and paste the quote into your blog.  Next, go to the citation machine.  Put in the information they ask to generate a citation for that quote.  Copy and paste the result into your blog below the quote.  Here’s a tutorial:

3.  Here are 3 quotes.  Plug each one in (one at a time) and write which are plagiarized and how you know:

I’m hungry for knowledge. The whole thing is to learn every day, to get brighter and brighter. That’s what this world is about. You look at someone like Gandhi, and he glowed. Martin Luther King glowed. Muhammad Ali glows. I think that’s from being bright all the time, and trying to be brighter.

My life is like a gigantic piece of beef jerky.  Hard to get through, but worth every moment.

I heard that your dreams came true. Guess she gave you things, I didn’t give to you.

Last month we discussed some of the changes in airport security due to the 9/11 attacks. Another big change is the law has become more punishing towards immigrants.   What this means is that if you are here illegally, suspected of being a terrorist, or commit even a minor crime (for example, jumping the turnstiles), you can be arrested and placed in an immigration detention center.  In those centers, human rights are violated.  In order to understand more about this issue, download the ICED game by clicking HERE.  After you play, answer the following questions in your blog:

1. Name 5 human rights and explain what they mean.  Watch THIS movie for more information. (for a smaller file size version click HERE).

2. What human rights are violated in the game ICED?  Explain.

3.  If you could re-design this game, what would you keep?  What would you do differently?

Play Voices of Youth’s game about HIV/AIDS by clicking HERE.  Next, answer the following questions in your blog:

1. What is this game about?

2. Explain some of the choices you made and what happened as a result?

3. Why is a game like this important?

4. How could this game be improved?

It is one of the most powerful words in the English language. The N Word ranges from being playful slang amongst friends to a word of pure hatred.  In this school, the N Word gets thrown around casually, like it’s no big deal.  As if the word means “friend”, “kid”, “dude”, “boy/girl” or “sister/brother”.  The problem is this: the N Word means much more than that.  It has a dirty, horrible history that can’t be washed away no matter how many times it is used.  Some argue that black people have taken the N Word and made it their own– thus taking its power away from the people who use it in a racist way.  What do you think?  Watch this video and answer the questions below.

N Word Part 1

N Word Part 2 

 

1. Where does the N-Word Come from? Why does it offend some people so much?

2.  Should non-black people be able to use the N-Word?

3. Should musicians stop using the N-Word?

4. Do other ethnic groups (for example, Chinese, Jews, and Dominicans) use ethnic slurs like the N-Word to describe themselves?  If not, Why?

5. What would happen if black people (and everyone else) started using “king” or “queen” instead of the N Word?

 

Extra Credit:  Write a poem or song against the use of the N-Word.

 

** Because the N Word has so much power to offend, please do not use the word it stands for in your post.  If you must, write n***a  or n***er.