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

Click for the next slide


At the end of Chapter 4, we created a slideshow that we'll now modify to use the button on the PicoBoard. This would be a perfect way to present your slideshow to a room full of friends and family, and you wouldn't need to sit in front of the computer screen to control the show.

Time for action – click for the next slide

Our original slideshow contains a when right arrow key pressed control block to advance the screen. We will leave that control in place so that our slideshow still works when we share it on the Web.

Open your slideshow and save it as a new project so that you can feel free to experiment without altering the original project. If you don't have the slideshow, you can download mine from this book's web site at Packt Publishing.

  1. From the Control palette, add a when flag clicked block to the scripts area for the stage.

  2. Add a forever if control block.

  3. From the Sensing palette, add the sensor block as the input for the forever if block. Select button pressed...