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

Barnyard humor


Let's spin some barnyard humor that's fit for users of all ages. Got a good joke or two? Feel free to substitute them for my example.

Table of contents

Our first step is to create a table of contents that users can use to navigate the jokes in our book.

Time for action – create TOC

To begin with, our book will have a chapter for a dog and a horse. We need to create clickable sprites to load into each chapter when we click on the entry in the table of contents.

  1. Let's create a new sprite by clicking on the paint new sprite button in Scratch.

  2. We need to add a button from Scratch's image library. From the Paint Editor, click the Import button to display the Import Image dialog box.

  3. Navigate to Costume | Things and select button. Click OK to add it to the Paint Editor's canvas.

  4. Use the Text tool to type Dog in any font you want.

  5. Resize the text and position the word Dog so that it fits inside the button. Don't make the button bigger or else you will compromise its quality.

  6. Click OK to save...