1. Music Video Inspiration

Welcome back to Scratch Music and Sound, day 6. Today, you’ll build a music video while learning about an important computer science concept called “procedures.” In computer science, a “procedure” is a set of many instructions packaged together to create a new command. In Scratch, the new command, or procedure, is a new, custom block, which you will create. For example, you could create a block named “CS First” that instructs the computer to make the Scratch Cat run onto the screen, say, "CS is awesome!" and run back off the screen. Then, when you want the cat to appear in your program, you just drag out the CS First block, instead of creating a whole new stack of blocks to make the cat appear and talk. The CS First block is an example of a procedure. Procedures are a short way to give the computer a set of instructions, and they are one way computer scientists like you save time and steps when coding. Today, you will use procedures to create custom blocks to make your music video. Scratch is a popular tool for making music videos. You can upload a song, then animate it using the code blocks you have learned about in this club. This is a pretty action-packed music video, but the code isn't complicated <show scripts tab>, and the animations are simple costume changes.

Take a look at some other music videos built with code blocks.

Those are some awesome videos created by Scratch computer scientists like you. Many of them were built with blocks you already know how to use. Of course, creating music videos and animating them can take a lot of time. But, the end result is fantastic, and those videos can be seen by thousands of people! Computer science involves a lot of steps and thinking through problems, but the final result can have a big impact on a lot of people and give you a great feeling of accomplishment--that makes the time and effort worth it for many computer scientists. Take a look at this sample video that shows some of the techniques you can learn today. Each sprite you see here behaves in a unique, fun way. You'll get to choose which of these behaviors you want to create in the next screencasts.

First, start a new project, name it "music video," and delete the Scratch cat.

Next, click on the music library link on the same CS First page as this screencast, and listen to a few songs.

In the new project you just made, click on the stage and the sound tab, then upload the song you chose. You may need to look in your "downloads" folder to find where the song is located on your computer. Now, it's your turn. Create a new project named "music video" and delete the Scratch cat. Choose a song from the CS First music library and upload it to the stage area of your project. After completing those steps, return to this CS First tab and click the green arrow to move on to the next screencast.