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

Time for action – draw the x and y axis of the grid


Right now, the graph looks out of place. Let's draw some reference points to the graph starting with the X and Y axes:

  1. Use the paint new sprite option to draw a small square sprite, and name it grid. You can use any color you want, but I'm using black.

  2. Let's draw the X axis first. From the Motion palette, add the go to x: and y: block. Set our original X and Y coordinates (-200, -140).

  3. From the Pen palette, add the set pen color to block and select black as the color.

  4. From the pen palette, add the pen down block.

  5. From the Motion palette, add the change x by block and set the value to 320. We'll build the graph 20 pixels bigger than we expect to use.

  6. From the Pen palette, add the pen up block.

  7. Next, we need to draw the Y axis. We can use the same block of code with a couple of slight alterations. Duplicate the existing blocks and append it to the script.

  8. Since we want to draw the Y axis, we need to swap out the second change x by block with a change...