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

Build a photo slideshow


It's easy to collect large amounts of digital pictures on our hard drives. For our next project, we're going to take a few photos and use Scratch to turn them into a slideshow to share with friends and family.

Before we begin, look through your photo library and identify a couple of photos for the show. If you don't have any photos, don't worry. Scratch includes some default backgrounds. I'll show you where they are in the first exercise.

Time for action – insert a title screen

Every presentation needs a title screen. Let's get started by creating a new Scratch project and deleting the cat:

  1. From the sprites list, select the stage.

  2. From the scripts area, click on the Backgrounds tab.

  3. Import a new background by clicking on the Import button. The Import Background dialog box displays.

  4. Browse the folders to select a background you like. I'm going to use the wooden-house from the Outdoors folder.

  5. From the backgrounds list, delete the default background by clicking on the X next...