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

Do you have a question?


Now is a logical time to build some audience participation into our game, so we're going to prompt the user for a question via the ask block. After the user types the question, the teller sprite will provide the fortune.

The ability to collect a string of text via the keyboard is new in Scratch 1.4.

Time for action – ask your question

Select the seeker sprite, and let's begin.

  1. From the Control palette, add the when seeker clicked block to the scripts area.

  2. From the Sensing palette, add the ask block to the when seeker clicked block.

  3. Type a question in the ask block. This is the question, the sprite seeker will ask.

  4. Add a broadcast block to the script and select the message fortune.

  5. Click the seeker to display the ask box on the stage.

  6. Type your question, and then either click the check mark on the ask field or press Enter on your keyboard. The teller responds with your fortune.

What just happened?

Let's hope our teller believes in the old mantra, "there are no dumb questions...