Notes:
Lesson 1.5: Artificial intelligence
Learning objective: In this exercise, you will learn how to put data into a program and get your program to make a decision based on that data. Resources: The sprites “ cat ” and “ bluedog ”; the backgrounds “ brick-wall1 ”, “ sydney ”, “ paris ” and “ new_york ”. Artificial intelligence is an area of computer science where people try to make computer programs that are smart in some way or another. The idea is to make computers seem like they are thinking like humans. This is actually quite tricky, as you can imagine, so here we are just going to give you a tiny taster of how you can make your programs seem a bit intelligent. The cat clearly thinks it’s clever, so let’s give it a chance to show us just how intelligent it is. To do this, we will use some more inputs and outputs, together with something called a “conditional statement”. That sounds very complicated, but it isn’t really. For my example, I have created two sprites: a cat and a dog. The cat is going to ask the dog a number of questions, so we need some variables in which to store the answers.
Create the following variables (we’ll tell you what they’re for in a minute):
age country holiday name
Before we begin, you should also import the “ bluedog ” sprite and the backgrounds “ brick-wall1 ”, “ sydney ”, “ paris ” and “ new_york ”. You will need them for what comes next.
Does the dog want a holiday?
First, we have to work out whether the dog actually wants to go on holiday. Select the cat sprite and build the script you can see in the screenshot above to help the cat find this out.
A beginner’s guide to Scratch
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