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

Summary


We have seen the power that lists and variables give us to create dynamic, flexible, and fun projects. As you worked through this chapter, you probably realized that we could have used lists in some of our previous projects. For example, our scripts in Chapter 5 would have been much smaller had we used lists.

We learned how to manipulate lists, a special kind of variable, to collect a group of related items. We continued to explore variables by using them to store text. The mod block helped us identify intervals as we iterated through our list. We used a variable to keep track of the interval so that we could program specific events based on when an interval occurred.

When we're working with text, it's natural to want to capture keyboard input from our user and then use that text in our scripts. Thanks to the new features in Scratch 1.4, we saw how easy it was to incorporate test strings from the user.

Our programming knowledge has been accumulating nicely to this point even though...