When we first started talking about activities, remember we talked about the background and we made the background a nice shade of blue?  Then, we went in and added a yellow square to the activity?  Well, that’s all well and good, but you know what they say, a picture is worth a thousand words!  So, don’t you think our activity should have some pictures?

Let’s start back with our basic activity.  Where we left it was with a blue background and a yellow square as follows:

Let’s take this one a step further.  Let’s take our yellow square and make it more interesting by changing it to not be yellow, but to rather display a picture.  We can do this by tapping on the yellow square to make it the “currently selected item” and then tapping on the hammer/wrench to bring up the properties.

You remember the properties editor.  From here, we changed our original green box to a yellow box.  Notice on the property editor that there is a little selector with the word “Picture” in it.  Tap on “Picture”

The picture selector shows you a set of buttons that have to do with setting a picture in place within the square instead of showing just a yellow color.  From here, touch the “Select from iPhotos” button.

When you do so, the pictures from your local device (iPad) are displayed.  Using this display, locate a picture you’d like to have shown instead of the yellow color.  In my case, I chose a picture of the world’s most awesome dog, Jami, from my camera roll.

Now that Jami is shown, I can kind of resize and do some minor movement to center her picture.   Next, I click the “Use” button and Jami is now in the activity!!  Go Jami!! Good girl!!

When I tap “Done” on the property editor, Jami looks a little small to me so I used my finger gestures to resize her to make her enormous!

And there you have it!!  You’ve replaced your yellow square with a picture of the world’s most awesome dog!… that is if you have a picture of Jami!

So, you can place a square on your activity.  You can colorize that square, and you can change the square to show a picture.  Now your activity is starting to become a bit more interesting, don’t you think?

Some things to think about:

1. Jami looks great on that blue background, but wouldn’t she look better sitting in a field of grass?  Try changing the picture associated with the background to place Jami into a grassy seen!!  She’d love that!
2. How could you change the picture back to a colorful square?   Could you use the property editor to do this?
3. What if your picture is sideways?  How would you rotate it to display on the correct angle?