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

Add sprites to the stage


Earlier in the chapter, we learned that if we want something done in Scratch, we tell a sprite by using blocks in the scripts area. A single sprite can't be responsible for carrying out all our actions, which means we'll often need to add sprites to accomplish our goals.

We can add sprites to the stage in one of the following four ways: paint new sprite, choose new sprite from file, get a surprise sprite, or by duplicating a sprite. We'll duplicate a sprite in a future chapter. The buttons to insert a new sprite using the other three methods are directly above the sprites list.

Let's be surprised. Click on get surprise sprite (the button with the "?" on it.). If the second sprite covers up the first sprite, grab one of them with your mouse and drag it around the screen to reposition it.

If you don't like the sprite that popped up, delete it by selecting the scissors from the tool bar and clicking on the sprite. Then click on get surprise sprite again.

Each sprite has...