Assignment 2: MIT Scratch & Software Interfaces

Assigned: Thu Sep 11
Due: Thu Sep 18

Audience:

Your audience for this assignment is the TID class.

Objective:

This assignment has two goals:

Introduce to programming using MIT Scratch software.
Have you apply Norman's design principles to visual interfaces.

Research:

Chapter 2 of DOET (The Design of Everyday Things)
Make observation notes about the web pages you visit over the next several days—pages that are elegant and easy to use, and pages that are confusing and frustrating
Read at least one essay at Jakob Nielsen's Usability and Web Design site. Look for the All alertbox columns link.

Medium:

The medium for this assignment (i.e., tangible materials in the work product) are programs developed using the MIT Scratch software. You will upload your projects to the MIT Scratch web site, and create a link to them from the wiki turn-in page.

The Assignment!

Download and install MIT Scratch from the project's home page, http://scratch.mit.edu. It is available for Mac and Windows and it works great on both platforms.

Start playing with the software. Learn how to create new sprites, make them move when you click on them, and change costumes. You can also experiment with other features like "broadcast" (which sends messages between sprites) and changing backgrounds.

There's lots of help available on the Scratch web site. Also, browse and check out the projects that are there! If you see one you like, you can download it and then see how it was implemented. You'll have to create an account on the Scratch site before you can download. (You'll need to do this anyway, because later you'll be uploading your own project.)

The goal of the assignment is to create some kind of engaging software interface in Scratch. You should choose whether to make something straightforward and easy-to-understand (i.e., a “good interface”) or something tricky and frustrating (i.e., a “bad interface”).

Implement your idea in Scratch. Then, create an account for yourself on the Scratch web site. After you have the account, upload your project to the site using the "Share" button in the Scratch software.

When you're uploading, make sure to describe your idea in the “Project notes” box! It is important that you describe what you were trying to accomplish so that we can best appreciate your work. Also, explain the Jakob Nielsen essay that influenced your work and describe how it did so.

After you've uploaded, go to http://scratch.mit.edu and look for your project on the site! It should be there in the recent projects section.

Click on your project, and you'll see it running in your web browser window. Finish the assignment by copying the URL of your project to the scratch-interfaces-turnin page.