Recently I attended a Google Day conference where the presenters focused on Google Applied Digital Skills and Digital Citizenship curriculum. To break up the day the presenters showed some of Google’s experiments and the one that really grabbed my attention is AutoDraw.

AutoDraw allows you to start drawing something and then using artificial intelligence the tool will try to predict what you are drawing. You can select the image that best fits what you were trying to draw and then edit the drawing by changing the colors, adding text, or making additional adjustments with lines and shapes. When you are finished you can download it locally on your computer.

This is a great tool when students need to add copyright free clipart or images to their presentations or projects. The only issue I have is that the downloaded images aren’t transparent which can be a pain when adding that image to your presentation if the background isn’t white.

To fix this I created a short tutorial on how to use AutoDraw with a free tool called PhotoScissors. With PhotoScissors you can easily remove a color from the background to make the picture transparent. I plan on using this tutorial with students in my coding class so that they can create their own sprites in Scratch.