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Astronaut Reaction Time Game Tutorial!
What is this?!
Did you know that the International Space Station travels at about 16,000 miles per hour?! The
astronauts that live on the Space Station have to have VERY quick reflexes when things are
moving that fast.!
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When training, astronauts are required to play a reaction time game to prove they are able to
react fast enough to handle the speed of the International Space Station.!
Part 1 - Set the Stage with a Space Theme!
1. Create a new Scratch program and delete the Cat sprite.!
2. You need to find and import a Space background for the stage and an Astronaut sprite.!
Part 2 - Create Variables to Store Data
Create a local variable named time. This variable will be used to store the reaction times of
players. Remember, local variables are For this sprite only.!
Part 3 - Begin the Reaction Game Code!
1. Select your Astronaut Sprite and start with a When green flag clicked block.!
2. Then click on Looks and connect the say for 2 secs block. Change the text to say
Hello! I’m an astronaut on the ISS. Are you ready?!
3. Add a wait 1 secs block underneath.!
4. Connect a say block and change the text to Hit Space!!
5. Click on Sensing and connect the reset timer block. This will set the timer to 0 so that
you will get an accurate measurement of how long it takes for someone to hit the space bar.!
6. Use the Control block wait until and place a key space pressed? Sensing block
inside the open slot of the wait until block. This will pause the program until the player
presses the space bar.!
7. Then connect another say block. Once the space bar has been pressed, you want to
display the reaction time to the player using two join blocks inside of the white space of
the say block:!
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8. Finally, select the set time to block from the variables section and add it to your code.
Instead of 0, set the time variable to timer:!
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9. Save your game at this point and play it a few times. It should look something like this:!
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Part 4 - Comparing the Player’s Reaction Time to the ISS Orbit!
Make sure your program is working correctly before moving on to this part.!
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1. First, you will need to make a new variable called distance in the same way you did
earlier.!
2. Attach a set distance to Variable block to your script. To calculate the distance
travelled by the ISS you need to take the player's reaction time, which is stored in the time
variable, and multiply it by 4.4. This is because on
average the ISS travels 4.4 miles per second!
FAST!!
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3. Next, add a wait 4 seconds Control block.!
4. Then add a say block. Just like you did in Part 3, you will use a couple of join blocks to
tell the user how far the ISS would travel while they were playing the game. We can use a
round block to show the result as a whole number:!
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5. Save your game and test that it works!!
Now what?!
Make the program better by asking for the player’s name before they start playing and store that
information in a new name variable. Then, change all three of your say blocks to include that
name. Also, change the original wait time to be random to make the game unpredictable.