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

Share with the Scratch community


As you browse projects on the Scratch web site, you may notice some projects get featured while, others have a lot of views and "love its." As a new Scratch programmer, we need to focus on developing our programming skills rather than trying to win a popularity contest.

Don't get discouraged if your projects seem to get lost among the thousands of other community projects. You'll eventually find an audience with the help of this chapter.

Now, let's select a project to share. I'm going to use the pong project from Chapter 6.

Reduce file size

When we share our work on the Web, we need to be conscious of how big our project file gets. Images and sounds will increase our file size more than anything else, and projects with large files take longer to load and play from the Web.

Fortunately, Scratch gives us a way to reduce the file size of our images and sounds before we share them on the Web.

Time for action – compress media files

Before we share our work, let's make...