Going in Circles

The first thing we tried in our Digital Art after school club was creating copies of a shape around a circle. This can be done with a simple program in Scratch. The following script will create 6 copies of the shape (repeat 6) and the copies will be placed evenly every 60 degrees (360/6) around the circle:

The shape that is copied with the stamp command is the costume of the Scratch sprite which you can edit by going to the Costumes tab and clicking on Edit. The turn command will pivot the shape around the center of rotation. By default the pivot center is the center of the costume. You can adjust this by clicking on the "Set costume center" button at the bottom of the editing dialog. A vertical and horizontal line appear which you can drag around until the place where they cross is at the point you want to pivot about:

By moving the center of the costume around you can get some interesting effects:

Here are some examples that the students created:

Other things to try are changing the colour using the "change color effect" command or turn by random angles inside the repeat using the random number generator.