City Cruise: Driving Through the Streets

As the teacher, guide students through a creative coding activity. Start with a charades game using action cards, then introduce a Scratch Jr project where they’ll program a car to drive across a city scene, adding movements and experimenting with resizing.

Learning Goals Learning Outcomes Teacher Notes

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1 Character Charades
2 Introducing the Car Driving Activity
3 Remove Scratch the Cat
4 Adding the Car and Changing the Background
5 Adding Movement
Challenge
Quiz

1 - Character Charades

Download and prepare the action cards from this step ➡️.

Cut them out and place them in a hat or a box.

Explain the game to the students: They’ll take turns drawing an action card and acting it out for the class.

Pick and perform: One student at a time will draw a card, then act out the movement on the card while the rest of the class guesses what it is.

Character Charades.pdf

2 - Introducing the Car Driving Activity

Tell the students that in today’s lesson, they’ll have the exciting task of making a car drive across a city! Explain that just like they practiced movements in the game, they will now program a car to move through the city streets in Scratch Jr. They’ll choose a car character, set it in a city background, and then give it the right commands to drive smoothly from one side of the city to the other.

3 - Remove Scratch the Cat

Explain that for this lesson, we will be giving Scratch the Cat a break.

Show the students how to remove Scratch the Cat from the project:

Tap and hold on the Scratch character in the character area.
An "X" will appear; tap the "X" to delete Scratch from the project.

4 - Adding the Car and Changing the Background

Demonstrate how to add a car character:

Tap the "plus" icon in the character area to open the character library.
Browse through the characters and select a car.
Add the car to the stage, placing it on the road in the city background.

Demonstrate how to change the background to the city scene:

Tap on the background icon above the stage area.
Browse through the backgrounds and select the city.
Show the students the city background, pointing out the road where they’ll make the car drive.

5 - Adding Movement

Show the students how to create a sequence of movement blocks to make the car drive across the city:

Use "move forward" blocks, adjusting the number of steps as needed.

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City Cruise: Driving Through the Streets