Simple Animation

Code blocks used in this tutorial:

• forever
• showLeds

Let’s start by making a simple animation:

We are going to use the Basic blocks. Click in Basic and drag and drop show leds on an open space on the right side. You will see that the block is semi-transparent. This means that the block is not connected to anything, therefore micro:bit won’t follow that instruction.

To connect the block, we need to place it inside a function block. Here, we have 2 basic function blocks: on start and forever. on start will do all the instructions inside it only once, when you start the program. forever will repeat the instructions inside it forever.

For our first project, we want to have the animation running forever, so we will put show leds inside forever.

Let’s draw a heart and test our program by clicking on play ▶.

You may have notice that the heart is not blinking. This is because we haven’t told micro:bit to do so. We need to explicitly tell our computer what it needs to do, otherwise, it won’t do it.

So, what do we need to do to make the heart blink? Turn the LEDs on and off!

Let’s add another show leds block below our heart. Make sure that all the LEDs are turned off.

Now click play ▶ and you should have a beating heart!

Are you up for a challenge?

Try to use what you learned and make the following animation:

Try to make it by yourself. Once you finish, you can check your solution with the answer here.