ScratchJr Halloween animation – carving and lighting up a Jack-o’-lantern

This Halloween themed animation will allow your students to practice all sorts of ScratchJr concepts: sending and receiving messages, “start on tap” and “wait” blocks, showing and hiding characters.
Your students will also have an opportunity to create irregular shapes in the ScratchJr paint editor.

Check out the a pumpkin lantern and a spooky bat animation below. Every time the bat is clicked, the lantern lights up for a second.

ScratchJr Halloween background and pumpkin face character

First, choose your background and draw a pumpkin on it (I used the “Woods” background).

ScratchJr Halloween animation background.
Halloween animation background

Next, create a new character – the pumpkin’s scary carved face. To create a grinning mouth, I started with the rectangle shape and then added many dragging points. Same with the mischievously glaring eyes – I started with a circle and then added and dragged on points, elongating them. You can learn more about this technique in this post.

ScratchJr character - Halloween pumpkin scary face
Black “pumpkin’s scary face” character.

When your “face” character is ready, you need to clone it (drag the character from the list on the left to the scene miniature on the right). Edit the second face character and make it glow yellow.

To copy the pumpkin’s face character, drag it from the list on the left to the scene miniature on the right.

Light up the ScratchJr Halloween lantern

Place the yellow face character on top of the black one. The characters should have exactly the same position. Next, hide the yellow character (to hide the character, add the “hide” block, tap it once and delete the block).

Next, add the bat to the scene. Every time the bat is clicked, it sends out a message. When the yellow face receives this message, it shows up for one second.

Here are the solution scripts:

Fill in the form below to download this project (.sjr file).

Boo! ? Have fun coding!

7 comments

    1. Hi Christopher! ScratchJr is a free app and you can install it on your iPad / Android tablet.
      Just go to AppleStore / GoogleStore, search for “ScratchJr” and install for free!

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