Happy Birthday from ScratchJr Fun!

In this ScratchJr project, I will show you how to light (and blow out ?) candles on a virtual ScratchJr birthday cake! You will learn how to creatively edit existing characters and backgrounds.

I was inspired to create this project by a book “My First Computer Coding Book with ScratchJr”.
I heartily recommend this cute book to you, you will find some ideas for really interesting projects there! Below you can watch the finished animation in action. Candles are lit on the cake and the student can “blow them out” by tapping them on the screen.

Are you ready to celebrate? ?

Baking a cake in ScratchJr

We will start with preparing a birthday cake. Add the “Cake” character and start editing. Remove the candles from the cake using the “Cut” (scissors) tool.
Some characters in ScratchJr work as a single entity and you cannot delete individual elements. However, many of the characters consist of several independent elements! Then you can edit the character and remove some of the parts.
This is the case here! We can use the Cake character, but remove the candles from it.

Play with colors and decorate your cake! For example, you can change the color of the topping and sprinkles or add your own decorations ? 

The last step is to draw new candles. Don’t add the flames! Flames will be separate characters that we will animate. Just add a few lines or narrow rectangles in the place of the candles.

Decorating for a party

It may be surprising, but to create the background of my animation I used… the build-in “Classroom” background! I edited the background and removed all the elements except the carpet and ribbons at the top. This is how I got my simple, nice looking party background.
What initially was the carpet, became the base for my cake! ? 

Time to light the candles!

The last step is to add the flames and prepare the script. Create a new character and draw a shape resembling a flame (this time I drew my flame by hand, but if you want to learn some surprising tricks on drawing shapes in ScratchJr, then be sure to read this post!)

Now add two scripts to your flame character. The first script causes the flame to burn (it increases slightly and decreases in an endless loop). The second script causes the flame to disappear when tapped. This is how you can blow out your candle!

When your first flame is ready, copy it several times (simply drag the flame from the characters menu on the left and drop on the background in the scenes menu on the right. This will copy the character together with its scripts).
Move your flames to place them over the candles.

Everything is ready now! You can start the animation, close your eyes, make a wish and blow out the candles! Have fun! ?

To download this project, please fill in the form below.