Book Image

Scratch 1.4: Beginner's Guide

Book Image

Scratch 1.4: Beginner's Guide

Overview of this book

If you have the imaginative power to design complex multimedia projects but can't adapt to programming languages, then Scratch 1.4: Beginner's Guide is the book for you. Imagine how good you'll feel when you drag-and-drop your way to interactive games, stories, graphic artwork, computer animations, and much more using Scratch even if you have never programmed before. This book provides teachers, parents, and new programmers with a guided tour of Scratch's features by creating projects that can be shared, remixed, and improved upon in your own lesson plans. Soon you will be creating games, stories, and animations by snapping blocks of "code" together. When you program you solve problems. In order to solve problems, you think, take action, and reflect upon your efforts. Scratch teaches you to program using a fun, accessible environment that's as easy as dragging and dropping blocks from one part of the screen to another. In this book you will program games, stories, and animations using hands-on examples that get you thinking and tinkering. For each project, you start with a series of steps to build something. Then you pause to put our actions into context so that you can relate our code to the actions on Scratch's stage. Throughout each chapter, you'll encounter challenges that encourage you to experiment and learn. One of the things you're really going to love is that, as you begin working through the examples in the book, you won't be able to stop your imagination and the ideas will stream as fast as you can think of them. Write them down. You'll quickly realize there are a lot of young minds in your home, classroom, or community group that could benefit from Scratch's friendly face. Teach them, please.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Scratch 1.4 Beginner's Guide
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
Preface
Scratch Resources
Index

Watch all sensor values


As we've seen throughout our projects, it can be helpful to watch the values associated with the PicoBoard sensors. In addition to selectively watching the sensor values, we can watch them all at one time.

From the Sensing palette, right-click on the sensor block and select the show ScratchBoard watcher option.

ScratchBoard was the predecessor to the PicoBoard. Selecting the ScratchBoard watcher places a monitor on the stage that shows all the sensors. Refer to the following screenshot:

As you look at the screenshot, you might think that some of the values are missing. The alligator clip sensors measure resistance, as the picture shows. However, the alligator clip sensors also report a true or false value to indicate when the clips touch. Why doesn't the ScratchBoard watcher show the Boolean value of the alligator clip sensors?

Have I led you enough yet? As you might guess, the Boolean values of the alligator clips are reported. We just have to interpret the true and...