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

Summary


What an exciting chapter! Programming in Scratch is easy; it's telling a story that's hard. Let's take a breath and recapitulate what we've learned.

In this chapter, we focused on telling a story, and everything we did added context to the story, including the way we animated our sprites with costumes. Not only do we need to think about how each scene unfolded, but we also need to provide navigation from one scene to the next.

Our sprites spoke for the first time in this chapter using speech bubbles. We learned how to apply the different types of say blocks to affect how our sprites spoke.

We enhanced our scripts with sound effects, including drums and musical instruments. We explored tempo and musical notes as ways to modify a sound. We also saw how easy it was to import our own sounds and use them with the project.

In our dog scene, the sprite moved around the screen, so we learned how to set the position of the dog using the X and Y coordinates.

We wrapped up all this activity with...