Chapter 3. Creating an Animated Birthday Card

Now that we've taken a tour of Scratch and created some sample scripts, let's actually create a complete project, right from concept to completion. In this chapter, we will create an animated birthday card for a friend or family member using both sprites that we design and sprites that we import from Scratch's library. Animating a card is an excellent introductory Scratch programming exercise because it can be accomplished using relatively basic concepts. We'll also be introducing Scratch's paint editor in this chapter, which gives really young children who might not be able to read very well a low-tech way to interact with Scratch by drawing and editing sprites.

In addition to doing something fun, practical, and thoughtful, we will also learn how to:

• Design bitmap and vector images using the built-in paint editor
• Initialize a sprite's starting values
• Name sprites in easy-to-remember ways
• Transform sprites...