Specification

Overview

A nursery rhyme is a short poem or song written for children. Though the term is typically applied to British or other English language poems, similar concepts exist in many world cultures. These short stories are generally meant to entertain and/or calm young children. Some are believed to have a hidden moral or meaning related to historical events, but many of these meanings are questionable.

Details

Behavior

You will create a short animation in BYOB depicting a nursery rhyme of your choice. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nursery_rhymes for a list of possibilities.) Your program should meet the following requirements:

• Whenever the green flag is clicked, your BYOB animation should display your chosen nursery rhyme line by line somewhere on the stage. (This should work correctly even if the last run was interrupted and restart.)
• As each line is shown, sprites should act out the story.
• The animation should advance on its own, but should do so at a pace that allows each action to complete and the viewer to read the line before the next line is shown and new action begins.
• In addition, the sprites must act out the rhyme; you should not simply create a series of static backgrounds or costumes that show a stop-motion version of the story.
• Each line must be readable and must stay shown while the corresponding action is occurring.
• When the story ends, there should be a way for the user to replay the entire animation from the beginning.
• You are free to be as creative as you like with your choice of sprites and actions.

You may choose from the sprites provided by BYOB or create your own. (You will not be graded on your artistic skills.) You may interpret the nursery rhyme literally or be clever with your depiction (but don’t go too far). However, all sprites, behaviors, words, and animations must be school-appropriate.

If you choose a particularly long nursery rhyme, you may not need to animate the whole thing. Please check with your teacher if you think your rhyme is long enough for this.

Implementation Details

As mentioned above, your animation must display the nursery rhyme in its entirety and animate each line. Action must be performed by sprites and must consist of more than simply changing costumes. You must include the following components in your animation:

• At least two sprites that act in some way to contribute to the depiction of the story
• At least one sprite that moves
• At least one sprite that rotates
• At least one sprite that changes costume
• At least one sprite that is both hidden and shown at some point

Note that multiple of these requirements may be satisfied by the same sprite (e.g. the same sprite can both move and change costume), but you must have at least two separate sprites that act in the animation.

Rubric