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

PicoBoard—what is it?


Not sure you want a PicoBoard? You can review the exercises in chapter to get a sense of what the board can do. Also, this chapter contains an excercise that uses gravity, which is something that will appeal to anyone who wants to make sprites fall.

With a PicoBoard, we can program our sprites to respond to real-world input from the following controls:

  • Slider

  • Light sensor

  • Sound sensor

  • Button

  • Four pairs of alligator clips

What does this mean? Well, we can program a sprite to jump each time we press a button, move across the stage as we move the slider, dance when we pass in front of the light sensor, apply a graphic effect when we clap our hands, or connect the alligator clips to form a circuit. These are just some ideas to get us started.

While the PicoBoard creates a deeper connection to our projects, there is a potential downside. The projects we adapt to use with the PicoBoard can be used only while we run the projects from our computer. Projects shared on the web cannot...