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

Next steps


This project spawns a lot of related ideas. You could build on the existing project by creating an interactive math lesson that asks a user to choose a starting number. Then, calculate the results and explain the math behind the results. After that, prompt for user-selected values.

You could use the stamp block to fill up the stage with grains of rice to show the power of doubling.

Our formula used a simple interest calculation, but you could apply the same principles we learned in this chapter to build a project to calculate and graph compound interest.

Of course, you could also create a project that illustrates mathematical folktales.

Using the pen tool in conjunction with the mathematical functions, you can create elaborate interactive art projects. Our project created a simple graph, but stop by the Pen Gallery on the Scratch web site for some inspiration: http://scratch.mit.edu/galleries/view/24716.