The Making of My #GTAATX Video

This summer I taught Video Game Design and Crazy for Coding classes to fourth and fifth graders. As I was helping some of my Coding students create in Scratch I had the crazy idea of creating a Google Teacher Academy video game. I spent some time playing with the idea. I found some images online (that were Creative Commons licensed of course) and started to piece them together in Scratch. I hated it and decided to scratch the idea of creating a GTA game all together. 

A little known fact about me ... I LOVE Google Draw! I use it on pretty much a daily basis for a wide variety of things. To me the possibilities are nearly endless. Right before leaving for Atlanta in ISTE I even used Google Draw to create my business cards. Later in the summer I was at the CPS Googlepalooza sitting in a Google Draw session led by the very awesome Jennie Magiera, and like a ton of bricks it hit me ... why was I looking for images online when I could create my own! 

I started with making the hallway scene. How hard could a bunch of lockers be to make? It wasn't that hard at all. So then I moved on to the classroom scene. Here is a little look through the revision history of how I created it.


Once I had all of the background images made I had to make the character (that's me I'm a character.) That was probably the most challenging to create. I actually checked out a drawing book from the library. My #miniman (also known as my son, Gavin) said my walking could have been a little better, but that's probably true in real life too.

After I completed all of the drawings I unscratched the Scratch idea. I downloaded all of the drawings that I had created and started putting them into Scratch and began "coding" the triggers to setup the time line of the video. Although creating the walking drawings was probably the most difficult part of the whole things, setting up everything in Scratch probably took the longest. It was a lot of fun and my #miniman even helped a little by creating the typing sound at the beginning. You can look inside here.


I created a screencast and did the voiceover using Screencast-O-Matic and iMovie. When all of that was done I uploaded it to YouTube. And got to work on my 800 character essays.

So ... I applied for the upcoming Google Teacher Academy in Austin, Texas!

This is my fourth time applying. How does that saying go? Fourth times the charm? At any rate, filling out the applications and creating the one minute videos have been a great reflective practice. After applying to #GTAMTV and getting rejected instead of feeling disheartened I felt challenged. Here's my finished product...


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