Introduction

This chapter focuses on using Scratch to do some calculations. One of the greatest uses of computers is to do tedious calculations to save time. This is because computers are very good at following a set of directions many times over—as we've seen through all the programming we've done so far.

We're going to work through three difference recipes in this chapter, two of which will do a lot of calculations for us very quickly. The third recipe will focus on creating a program that can be used as a basic password generator. Lastly, we'll play around with a few other ways we can make calculations in Scratch.

All of these recipes will focus heavily on the use of blocks we've used before, in addition to many new ones from the Operators category:

The blocks from this category allow us to do a lot of different mathematical computations on the numbers (usually stored as variables) in our programs.

Let's get going with our first recipe!