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

Step into the light, please


While our Scratch sprites can't see the outside world, we can use the light sensor on the PicoBoard to control a sprite based on the amount of light detected by the sensor.

For this exercise, we'll modify a dragon sprite and make it grow based on the amount of light it receives.

Time for action

Scratch includes several sprites that have scripts by default, which means the sprite is already programmed to do something. We're going to use such a sprite to jump-start this exercise:

  1. Open a new Scratch project, and select the choose new sprite from file option.

  2. Open the Fantasy folder and select the Growing Dragon sprite. It's the dragon designated as having 1 script.

  3. The sprite contains one simple script that sets the size of the dragon based on the loudness block. Click the flag and make some noise. See the dragon expand and contract.

  4. Now, replace the loudness block that's inside the set size to block with the sensor value block. Select light from the drop-down list.

  5. Enable...