1. Introduction to Characterization and Broadcast

(funky music)

Hey computer scientists, welcome to CS First Storytelling.

Today, you will create a story using characterization.

In storytelling, characterization gives important details about the personality, background and motivations of a character to let the audience get to know him or her better.

To give the audience more details about a character, authors use five main elements: dialogue, thoughts, actions, appearance and effect on others.

Check out how these elements are uses in these projects.

By adding details about what a character says and thinks, what he or she looks like and how he or she interacts with others, authors reveal a character's personality.

This helps the audience feel more connected with both the character and the story.

To create your characterization story, you'll begin with a starter project.

This project has two main sprites, a narrator sprite that tells the story and a main character sprite.

The narrator will talk to the audience about the main characters thoughts and the main character will act out the story by changing its actions and appearance depending on what the narrator says.

In order for the main character to know and act out what the narrator is saying, you willneed to instruct the computer to broadcast or send the message that tells the other sprites to react to the narrator.

In the previous project you used the say block to create dialogue.

The say block lets the audience read what the sprite's say to each other but the sprites can't read what's in the say block.

To communicate, sprites need information broadcast to them.

When you receive the message from a weather reporter that it might rain you react by packing your umbrella.

The broadcast block does the same thing.

It sends a message, and the part of the program that receives the message, then reacts in a specific way.

The starter project already contains the dinosaur's reactions to messages that the narrator will broadcast.

You will choose when to broadcast them.

To get started, click on the starter project link and sign in to Scratch.

Then click remix, then return to see us first and watch the next video and learn how to broadcast an action to your main character.