Hey everyone! Get it? lit, literature, anyway… For this week’s blog post on coding, I did one of the programs on Hour of Code. I’ve done coding before in my past schooling and enjoyed it, but it’s not really my cup of tea. When I did it in the past, we built Lego robots, and we had to code them to move and do different tasks. After looking over the Hour of Code site, I realized there were so many other things you can do and create with codes. The program I chose for this post was Poem Art. The description for Poem Art was to “illustrate the mood of a poem with code.” The activity started with an introduction video that I found helpful considering I had no idea what I was starting.

I learned we were combining computer science and poetry to create our own animated poems. The left side is where the poems appeared, the middle was the toolbox with the different codes, and the right side of the screen was the workspace to use the toolbox and create our animated poems. There were different poems you could choose from, but I mostly just used the one that came with the level. There were also two types of learning depending on the level, some levels were skill building and some were predicting. The skill building taught us a new effect to add to our animated poems each time.

Level one was skill-building and asked us what feeling we got when reading the poem and what color matched the feeling. I felt like I was under the stars when I read the poem, so I adjusted my effects accordingly. There was a HUGE variety of colors, effects, backgrounds, and fonts to choose from. My choices: Background: Night sky, Text: Yellow, Text Effect: Fade In.

My animated poem with my choices.

Level two was predicting.

It asked us what sounds and images came to mind when we read the poem. There was only a text box on this page, no coding. I predicted birds singing, a fountain in a park, and a microphone. My predictions were pretty accurate, even though I’m sure 99% of people would say birds singing as a sound. The sound the poem gave based on my predictions, here.

Level three was another skill-building exercise; this time we were learning sounds and music that matched the feeling of the poem. The poem was about toasting marshmallows, so I immediately thought of a campfire and the fire crackling. I also added the other effects that we learned that matched the feel of the poem.

Click here to watch and listen to my poem with the effects chosen above.

Level four was another skill-building one; this time we learned about events and mood shifts within a poem. There was another information video that showed us how to add effects to show a difference in mood between the different lines of the poem. I really enjoyed this level, it was fun to create different shifts between lines with all the different effects. I went a little overboard on the effects this time but the poem turned out so cool once animated!

Watch the mood shift effects in action here.

Level five was another predicting one. It asked us what images came to mind when we read the poem. The poem was about books and a library so that’s also what I wrote for images I saw. Personally I didn’t really think that my predictions matched what the animation gave.

Level six followed level five and talked about imagery. I learned about sprites which are 2D images in coding. It showed how to add sprites and how we can animate them to move as well within the poem. Level seven showed how to add behaviours to our sprites or the ‘actions’ they can do. I had unknowingly jumped the gun and added behaviours in my level six animation, when the clouds started moving and the tree started to grow, so I already understood level seven and quickly moved onto eight.

Imagery Animation 

Level eight was changing the size of the sprites. Example

Level nine was a freeplay to create our own animation using all we have learned from level 1-8. I really had fun with this coding program and found it fairly simple to navigate, and the videos were super helpful! My favourite part was all the customizing we are able to do, and now I know you can do a whole abundance with coding. At first I didn’t really care about coding, but after learning about it and doing it myself I think it can be a super helpful tool for students and a great thing for them to learn.

Watch my final animation with everything I learned! I think it turned out pretty fun! My final animation! 

*You may need to click the pause/play button once to get the sound to come through*