dotted circles version one

My idea was to build an application that indigenous students would find interesting which in turn would interest them to learn coding in Scratch. I'll write a more detailed educational rationale later, although I have written some before too.

You can find the application, written in Scratch3.0 here

Some more screenshots of what it can do:

There were a number of design challenges.

An earlier version had far too many variables to be set by the user before they could make anything. I felt the users would lose patience with it. This version has only three variables: background effect, dot colour and number of circles.

I was tempted to introduce a second dot colour, to have one colour for the inner and outer rings and a different colour for the inbetween rings. But for the sake of simplicity I rejected that. The end product would be richer but the user interface would be more complicated.

Other rejected variables include dot size, dot spacing, inner radius, radius increment.

I like the lumpy dots effect, which goes in all directions.

With the backgrounds I had to find a way to do them quickly so I opted for randomly large to small dots of a particular colour with shade variations stamped onto the page.

Earlier rationale: Proposal for an Australian indigenous version of Culturally Situated Design Tools