What this book covers
Chapter 1, Welcome to Scratch 2.0, introduces Scratch and the various types of projects covered in the book.
Chapter 2, A Quick Start Guide to Scratch, takes us on a tour of the online Scratch community. In this chapter, we will create our first Scratch animation while learning basic programming concepts such as loops.
Chapter 3, Creating an Animated Birthday Card, will guide us through how to use Scratch's built-in paint editor to draw bitmap and vector images. To create the card, we will learn important programming concepts such as project initialization, object naming, and event coordination.
Chapter 4, Creating a Scratch Story Book, will guide us through how to build a joke book and coordinate scene changes as a way to navigate through the book. The chapter introduces sound and coordinates as a way to move sprites.
Chapter 5, Creating a Multimedia Slideshow, will guide us through how to create a personalized slideshow by uploading files from our computer. We will also work on resizing images and recording slide narrations that can be played on demand.
Chapter 6, Making an Arcade Game – Breakout (Part I), remixes the classic Pong game into our own brick-busting version called Breakout. We'll clone sprites, estimate direction, and create custom variables to develop the framework of the game.
Chapter 7, Programming a Challenging Gameplay – Breakout (Part II), builds on our Breakout game from the previous chapter. Here, we make the gameplay more challenging by programming the ball speed and reducing the paddle size based on the gameplay. Important concepts include custom procedures, Boolean values, and cloud data.
Chapter 8, Chatting with a Fortune Teller, deals with our game of fortune, where a fortune teller will provide a random fortune in response to the user's typed question. We will work with lists, track intervals with mod, and split words apart to identify individual words.
Chapter 9, Turning Geometric Patterns into Art Using the Pen Tool, combines all the programming concepts we've learned so far to draw art using simple math equations, polygons, and string art. The projects will show you how to take user-defined values and turn them into shapes. This chapter also explains how to apply color and shades to Scratch projects.
Appendix A, Connecting a PicoBoard to Scratch 1.4, emphasizes on projects that use a computer's webcam and the PicoBoard, which is an add-on device capable of running on Scratch 1.4 on the Raspberry Pi. The PicoBoard project incorporates an experiment that measures the resistance of warming water using a thermistor and generates graphs for it.
