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

Install Scratch


From time to time, the Scratch team will release updated versions of Scratch. To download the latest version of Scratch for Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux, go to http://scratch.mit.edu/ and follow the download link. You will be prompted to register first. Fill in all of the form's requested information or none of it, depending on your desired level of privacy.

Click the Continue to Scratch Download button to display the Scratch Download page.

Here, you can download the installer for your operating system, as shown in the previous screenshot. Feel free to skip ahead to your system.

Windows

For a normal Windows installation, we can download the Scratch installer, which guides us through the installation steps. When you launch the installer, Windows may complain that the Scratch installer is unsigned. You'll need to accept the message by clicking on the Run button, which implies you trust that the Scratch installer will not do harmful things to your computer.

Note

If you have a...