Feb 16, 2024: Einstein Tile 3, MakeCode Arcade

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Back to: SciTech Friday’s 2023-24

Table Of Contents
  1. Today's Video
  2. Design Time
  3. Break
  4. Making a Platform Game
  5. Breaking News
  6. Notes & Artifacts

Today’s Video

But First- An Experiment

You will need:

  • clear plastic sheet (e.g. acrylic)
  • clear tape
  • 2x polarizing filter (polarizing sheet, polarizing sunglasses)
  • Optional: LCD screen

Procedure

  1. Decorate the plastic sheet with pieces of tape. It’s ok to overlap (or not!)
  2. Look through your creation. What do you see?
  3. Take a polarizer and put it behind your decorated sheet, and another in front. Look through it and rotate the polarizers (keeping it all like a flat sandwich). What do you see?

What do you think is happening?

Optional

  1. Put a blank white image on an LCD (not OLED!) screen, or go to blank white screen
  2. Remove the back polarizer from your “sandwich”
  3. Look at the screen through your “sandwich”
  4. Rotate the remaining (front) polarizer

What do you observe?

Can you explain it?

Another Kind of Vision

Discussion

  1. what does a polarizer do?
  2. what is a polarimeter used to measure?
  3. how does a polarimeter work?
  4. why do polarizing sunglasses have a vertical (up and down) orientation for the polarizer?
  5. Some animals and insects can see the polarization of light. What are two advantages (“uses”) for them?
  6. Can you see polarized light?

Design Time

From Last Week

We’re going to build our own Einstein Puzzle, similar to these ->

Spectre Tile Set

Building Our Own Spectre Tile

Note: I suggest leaving the page view settings alone – we will be printing this on paper!

Also, change the document size to US letter- landscape or portrait.

Follow this video (from 7:40)

Make sure you save your file (on the public drive), and make a copy of your shape!

Next, add some curves or other patterns from edge to edge to decorate your tiles. You can make bigger lines by changing the stroke size. Play with the background colors.

Here are some examples of what I’m poorly describing (I mean the patterns on the tiles, not their shapes!)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tantrix

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsuro

https://www.geogebra.org/m/k6ptjt2f

When you’re happy with your pattern, group all the parts and scale it to a reasonable puzzle piece size.

Duplicate it across and down the page – Check with Drea or Julian when you think you’re done.

Making it with the Cricut

Drea and Julian will help you use the Cricut to cut out your tiles.

Testing

See how big a pattern you can make!

Break

Making a Platform Game

Warm Up

https://jeopardylabs.com/play/platform-games

https://buzzonk.com (optional buzzer)

Carry On

Please continue working through MakeCode Arcade or start on the Godot tutorial if MakeCode arcade is too easy.

MakeCode Arcade

We’re going to focus on making platformer style games.

Start with the intro tutorial – find it on https://arcade.makecode.com/

READ THE TIPS!

Then please carry on with:

Introduction to the Godot Game Engine

Breaking News

Video for lunch

Notes & Artifacts

Details

Notes

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