Part of Lesson Plan: Storyboarding a Scenario

Activity Overview / Details

Now that students have a scenario to work with, we are going to introduce the concept of story boarding.

To the Students: Ok class, we have our scenarios. Now we need to figure out how we're going to turn the story in our scenarios into a program in Alice. This is where storyboards come in. Storyboards help us break up our scenarios into scenes (or shots). We use the scenes to show what the objects need to be doing when the program runs.

There are two typs of Storyboards we can use. Visual or text-only. Because Alice is a 3D programming environment, we are going to focus on creating visual storyboards. In a visual story board, we use pictures, scetches or screenshots to break up the story into snapshots of the scene. The snapshots are numbered and created in sequence. This helps in the programming process later. A text storyboard is basically the same as a Visual storyboard but wothout the pictures. In a text-based storyboard, usually the actionsof the objects are described in more detail because there are no pictures to help describe the scene.

Going back to the Rock and Fish scenario, lets look at what a completed Visual Storyboard looks like. Project a blank Storyboard form onto the overhead. Using an annotation program to write in the PDF, talk through filling in the Storyboard for the Scenario (See the Rock and Fish Visual Storyboard example PDF for a completed Storyboard).

You can see we've broken down the Rock and Fish scenario into 6 scenes. Each scene represents the action being taken by the objects as it was described in the scenario. Discuss the scenes with students as you complete each one, being sure to point out the actions being described. For example, in Scene/Shot 2 the action is the fish jumping out of the water. In Scene/Shot 3 the action is the fish landing on the rock. And so on and so forth.

Be sure to point out the opening Scene and the closing Scene. We don't have action in these scenes, but we do have Titles.