Hi @Coralie@Tamara.Koehler, Hi all dear CoSpacers,
with these posts I would like to share to the community, step by step, the project that won the Digital School Award at Expo Dubai in order to positively #contaminate those who have the patience and curiosity to read. I prefer to subdivide each of the 9 scenes in order to tell the solutions we have applied both as environment design and for coding.
It all started by reading the book: “We are the future” (a collection of 17 short stories based on the UN Agenda 2030 for sustainable development). The 21 students who were part of the working group chose “The green angel” by A. Bordiglioni, based on the fight against climate change.
First of all we chose the title: “Ideas in motion: the future is in our hands”. It was immediately clear that we would choose CoSpaces with Merge Cube in order to have the world metaphorically and truly in our hands. The main target were children so we limited the text to a minimum, to the advantage of the audio resources (we are working on the English version).
Before actually starting the creation of the scenes it was obviously necessary to prepare the script, breaking down the narration into single scenes with the creation of the sets, dialogues, effects and music, movements and challenges (in pseudo-code), seen that the whole project is an adventure with tests to be overcome by adopting good practices.
Luciana, the protagonist, is a girl that falls asleep after seeing terrible images of the effects that environmental pollution causes on the planet … she is very upset! In a dream she is led by a magical tree to explore some environments in which, thanks to good practices, men are trying to positively change the fate of the Earth …
But how to make the falling asleep phase visible? we have formulated several options; in the end we decided to simulate a rise in the air among the clouds appearing slowly. This is the pseudo-code: the book, after being clicked, opens and slowly appears with the bed and the protagonist who watch at images of pollution on her laptop, she falls asleep and gets up into the clouds.
to create the transitions we used the “for” cycle that, step by step, increases the opacity of the elements initially set to 0.
Luciana is carried by the magic tree in front of an island and she sees a houseboat made from plastic bottles. We thought of a game that consists of collecting bottles from the sea and the beach to clean up the environment and help the boy complete his house.
Pseudo-code: by clicking on each bottle, it rises towards a target cuboid and then reaches the home; at the same time it increases the “score” variable. When “score” reaches the value 4 the test is passed, activates the animations and the victory sounds and brings up the button to go forward.
As already mentioned we used an invisible cuboid as a target to get the bottle lifted before reaching the house.
I don’t have emojis enough to express how much I like your project Giuseppe and appreciate the way you introduced it here in the form. I’m sure many teachers from all over the world will be ispired by your work. Congratulations:tada:@EdTechnocation what do you think about it?
Leaving the beach, Luciana finds herself in front of a strange building. The tree tells her that it is a power station for the transformation of plastic into energy and the little carbon dioxide produced is sent miles underground. This scene uses the physics engine built into CoSpaces. When a transparent cuboid is clicked it generates a clone of the plastic bottle to which physics is applied. Thanks to the force of gravity, it falls into the tunnel of the factory and, by collision, adds points to the counter. Reached 4 points it activates a function that starts the emission of fumes and allows you to go to the next scene.
At this point, we find ourselves in the middle of the desert. Our mission is to install 17 solar panels by clicking on the ground. The solar panel model is not present in CoSpaces gallery so we loaded it from Google Poly (unfortunately this option is no longer available because Google site closed; however, there are many other possibilities to find and import free 3D models). The problem is to set, at first, the opacity of all 17 models to 0 in order to be not visible but clickable. We listed them one by one but then we discovered the “for” function. We repeated this operation 17 times storing them within the variable “panel”, which contained “get item" block, the concatenation of the “Solar Battery” string plus the variable “i” that was incremented. We have thus saved a large number of blocks! We learned an important rule: programmers are lazy!
Luciana is transported in front of a hydroelectric power station. The tree explains her how important it is to use renewable sources to produce energy. To build the structure and, above all, the turbine we used building blocks (by the way, I will soon share you lesson plans on building 3d models). The logic is based on active research: the heart of the structure (the turbine) must be identified, so clicking on it, activates the rotation, the street lamps are turned on and therefore the level is exceeded.
Obviously the CoSpaces I’m sharing are all remixable so you can use both the elements and the code part. I would be happy to have your feedback.
We are in the scene where the protagonist is taken in front of a wind farm. It was a particularly complex scene both in terms of creating the 3D model of the wind tower and in terms of programming. The 3D model was created starting from some reference images of real wind towers and then was modeled using building blocks as shown in the video below (made on iPad).
Now take a look at CoBlocks.
The cloud has physics applied to it, the force of gravity is 0. When the program starts, a clone of the cloud is created; when you click on the clone it gets a push towards a target cuboid. If the rotor of the wind turbine collides with the cloud it starts to rotate and increases the score, the clone is eliminated and a new clone is created.
We are now into my favourite scene, maybe the most complex and with better results in terms of coding but also for the possibility of positively inspiring the young generations. Felix is a boy with a big dream: plant millions of trees around the world and he reached his objective thanks to all the people who believed in his dream and helped him. The pseudo-code: when you click on the ground (a target transparent cuboid) Felix reach this place and plant a tree… but if meanwhile you change idea the task is stopped an Felix change his direction to the new one. Here a scene with this behavior. We applied this to the final scene:
In this scene Luciana is projected 20 years into the future. She stands in front of her future home, built with eco-sustainable materials with low environmental impact (for a future upgrade of this project I will propose to my students a great lesson plan that you can find in resources #CoSpaceForFuture ). She sees herself looking out and greeting her with her two children; it is a scene that emotionally involved all my students because, identifying with the girl, they imagined seeing themselves as adults in a world that will be the result of the choices we make today. They have gained awareness of how important it is to support attention to social and environmental issues. The final “prize” is “The world I would like”, a challenge that I proposed to them and, in a collaborative way, they created their ideal world. I don’t like to call this the final scene, it’s more of a starting point … the World is in our hands and there is still a long way to go !
Giuseppe and appreciate the way you introduced it here in the form. I’m sure many teachers from all over the world will be ispired by your work. Congratulations:tada:@EdTechnocation what do you think about it?
