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

Host your Scratch projects


The Scratch web site is easy and it likely meets the needs of most people, but we're not limited to hosting our projects on the Scratch web site. We can use our own web servers.

There are several reasons to self-host our Scratch projects. Your classroom or community center may have limited access or bandwidth, which makes uploading and viewing projects on the Web difficult. You might prefer to keep the projects private or not allow others to remix the content. Or, you might simply want to build web site traffic to your own web site. Regardless of the reason, we can do it.

This is a relatively advanced topic for our book, and I'll assume you know something about FTP and web servers to complete this section. More importantly, it requires you to have access to a web server.

Install files to a web server

To host our own projects, we need to complete the following tasks:

  • Install the Java support files, which are available from the Scratch web site

  • Upload a Scratch project...