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Home > Programming > Programming Language > Scratch 2.0 Beginner's Guide: Second Edition
Scratch 2.0 Beginner's Guide: Second Edition
Scratch 2.0 Beginner's Guide: Second Edition

Scratch 2.0 Beginner's Guide: Second Edition: Create digital stories, games, art, and animations through six unique projects.

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Scratch 2.0 Beginner's Guide: Second Edition

Chapter 2. A Quick Start Guide to Scratch

The anticipation of learning a new programming language can sometimes leave us frozen on the starting line, not knowing what to expect or where to start. Together, we'll take our first steps into programming with Scratch, and block-by-block, we'll create our first animation. Our work in this chapter will focus on getting ourselves comfortable with some fundamental concepts before we create projects in the rest of the book.

In this chapter, we will be introduced to Scratch programming. We will:

  • Join and tour the online Scratch community
  • Create a project to take our first steps in Scratch
  • Introduce loops using forever and repeat blocks
  • Add and animate multiple sprites in a project
  • Remix a video-sensing project

Joining the Scratch community

If you're planning to work with the online project editor on the Scratch website, I highly recommend you set up an account on scratch.mit.edu so that you can save your projects. If you're going to be working with the offline editor, then there is no need to create an account on the Scratch website to save your work; however, you will be required to create an account to share a project or participate in the community forums.

Let's take a moment to set up an account and point out some features of the main account. That way, you can decide if creating an online account is right for you or your children at this time.

Time for action – creating an account on the Scratch website

Let's walk through the account creation process, so we can see what information is generally required to create a Scratch account. Open a web browser and go to http://scratch.mit.edu, and click on the link titled Join Scratch.

  1. At the time of writing this book, you will be prompted to pick a username and a password, as shown in the following screenshot. Select a username and password. If the name is taken, you'll be prompted to enter a new username. Make sure you don't use your real name. This is shown in the following screenshot:
    Time for action – creating an account on the Scratch website
  2. After you enter a username and password, click on Next. Then, you'll be prompted for some general demographic information, including the date of birth, gender, country, and e-mail address, as shown in the following screenshot. All fields need to be filled in.
    Time for action – creating an account on the Scratch website
  3. After entering all the information, click on Next. The account is now created, and you receive a confirmation screen as...

Time for action – understanding the key features of your account

When we log in to the Scratch website, we see our home page, as shown in the following screenshot:

Time for action – understanding the key features of your account

We reviewed the Create and Explore interfaces briefly in Chapter 1, Welcome to Scratch 2.0; so, we'll take a brief click-through tour of some of the primary features, starting from the right-hand side of the navigation and working towards the left.

  1. All the projects we create online will be saved to My Stuff. You can go to this location by clicking on the folder icon with the S on it, next to the account avatar, at the top of the page. The following screenshot shows my projects:
    Time for action – understanding the key features of your account
  2. Next to the My Stuff icon in the navigation pane is Messages, which is represented by a letter icon. This is where you'll find notifications of comments and activity on your shared projects. Clicking on this icon displays a list of messages.
  3. The next primary community feature available to the subscribed users is the Discuss page. The Discuss...

Taking our first steps in Scratch

From this point forward, we're going to be project editor agnostic, meaning you may choose to use the online project editor or the offline editor to work through the projects.

When we encounter software that's unfamiliar to us, it's common to wonder, "Where do I begin?". The Scratch interface looks friendly enough, but the blank page can be a daunting thing to overcome. The rest of this chapter will be spent on building some introductory projects to get us comfortable with the project editor.

If you're not already on the Scratch site, go to http://scratch.mit.edu and let's get started.

Time for action – moving the cat across the stage

As a warm up, we're going to make the default Scratch cat move across the stage.

  1. Click on the Create button to open a new project in the editor. The project contains a single sprite—the Scratch cat.
  2. In the blocks palette, click on the Events button.
  3. Drag the when flag clicked block to the scripts.
  4. In the blocks palette, click on the Motion button.
  5. Drag the move (10) steps block to the scripts area and snap it to the bottom of the when flag clicked block, as shown in the following screenshot:
    Time for action – moving the cat across the stage

    Tip

    How to snap two blocks together

    As you drag a block onto another block, a white line is displayed to indicate that the block you are dragging can be added to the script. When you see the white line, release your mouse to snap the block in place.

  6. Click on the green flag above the stage repeatedly to set our first Scratch program in motion.

    Tip

    If the cat reaches the end of the stage, you need to manually move the sprite to the left side...

Time for action – animating a walking motion with the cat

We're going to build on our script by creating an appearance of movement:

  1. From the Looks palette, attach the switch to costume () block to the move () block in our script. The default costume will be costume2.
  2. Click on the green flag to move the cat. Note that the first time we clicked on the flag, the appearance of the cat changed, but it remained the same on subsequent movements.
  3. We'll make the animation more realistic in a minute, but let's examine the costumes by clicking on the Costumes tab. The following screenshot shows the contents of the Costumes tab:
    Time for action – animating a walking motion with the cat
  4. This view opens the sprite in the paint editor, but our primary interest is the costume thumbnails. If you've run the script as we've created, then costume2 is highlighted. Alternatively, click on the thumbnails and observe how selecting the costume displays on the stage.
  5. Depending on the speed of your clicks, the cat has the appearance of walking...

Joining the Scratch community

If you're planning to work with the online project editor on the Scratch website, I highly recommend you set up an account on scratch.mit.edu so that you can save your projects. If you're going to be working with the offline editor, then there is no need to create an account on the Scratch website to save your work; however, you will be required to create an account to share a project or participate in the community forums.

Let's take a moment to set up an account and point out some features of the main account. That way, you can decide if creating an online account is right for you or your children at this time.

Time for action – creating an account on the Scratch website

Let's walk through the account creation process, so we can see what information is generally required to create a Scratch account. Open a web browser and go to http://scratch.mit.edu, and click on the link titled Join Scratch.

  1. At the time of writing this book, you will be prompted to pick a username and a password, as shown in the following screenshot. Select a username and password. If the name is taken, you'll be prompted to enter a new username. Make sure you don't use your real name. This is shown in the following screenshot:

  2. After you enter a username and password, click on Next. Then, you'll be prompted for some general demographic information, including the date of birth, gender, country, and e-mail address, as shown in the following screenshot. All fields need to be filled in.

  3. After entering all the information, click on Next. The account is now created, and you receive a confirmation screen as shown in the following screenshot...

Time for action – understanding the key features of your account

When we log in to the Scratch website, we see our home page, as shown in the following screenshot:

We reviewed the Create and Explore interfaces briefly in Chapter 1, Welcome to Scratch 2.0; so, we'll take a brief click-through tour of some of the primary features, starting from the right-hand side of the navigation and working towards the left.

  1. All the projects we create online will be saved to My Stuff. You can go to this location by clicking on the folder icon with the S on it, next to the account avatar, at the top of the page. The following screenshot shows my projects:

  2. Next to the My Stuff icon in the navigation pane is Messages, which is represented by a letter icon. This is where you'll find notifications of comments and activity on your shared projects. Clicking on this icon displays a list of messages.

  3. The next primary community feature available to the subscribed users is the Discuss page. The Discuss page shows a list...

Taking our first steps in Scratch

From this point forward, we're going to be project editor agnostic, meaning you may choose to use the online project editor or the offline editor to work through the projects.

When we encounter software that's unfamiliar to us, it's common to wonder, "Where do I begin?". The Scratch interface looks friendly enough, but the blank page can be a daunting thing to overcome. The rest of this chapter will be spent on building some introductory projects to get us comfortable with the project editor.

If you're not already on the Scratch site, go to http://scratch.mit.edu and let's get started.

Time for action – moving the cat across the stage

As a warm up, we're going to make the default Scratch cat move across the stage.

  1. Click on the Create button to open a new project in the editor. The project contains a single sprite—the Scratch cat.

  2. In the blocks palette, click on the Events button.

  3. Drag the when flag clicked block to the scripts.

  4. In the blocks palette, click on the Motion button.

  5. Drag the move (10) steps block to the scripts area and snap it to the bottom of the when flag clicked block, as shown in the following screenshot:

    Tip

    How to snap two blocks together

    As you drag a block onto another block, a white line is displayed to indicate that the block you are dragging can be added to the script. When you see the white line, release your mouse to snap the block in place.

  6. Click on the green flag above the stage repeatedly to set our first Scratch program in motion.

    Tip

    If the cat reaches the end of the stage, you need to manually move the sprite to the left side of the stage by clicking...

Time for action – animating a walking motion with the cat

We're going to build on our script by creating an appearance of movement:

  1. From the Looks palette, attach the switch to costume () block to the move () block in our script. The default costume will be costume2.

  2. Click on the green flag to move the cat. Note that the first time we clicked on the flag, the appearance of the cat changed, but it remained the same on subsequent movements.

  3. We'll make the animation more realistic in a minute, but let's examine the costumes by clicking on the Costumes tab. The following screenshot shows the contents of the Costumes tab:

  4. This view opens the sprite in the paint editor, but our primary interest is the costume thumbnails. If you've run the script as we've created, then costume2 is highlighted. Alternatively, click on the thumbnails and observe how selecting the costume displays on the stage.

  5. Depending on the speed of your clicks, the cat has the appearance of walking or running in place. There's no...

Time for action – saving our work

The online project editor will autosave our work, but it's good practice to manually save our projects, especially before you close your web browser or navigate away from the Scratch website.

  1. To manually save your new project, click on Save now from the File menu at the top of the project editor. This works whether we're working with the online or offline editor.

  2. As you review the project, you'll notice that each project has a name. Our current project is called untitled. To change the name of your project from untitled, find the white textbox above the stage and change the project name to something meaningful by clicking in the box and typing. The following screenshot shows the project name in relation to the screen. My project is named run, kitty, run.

What just happened?

Autosave is nice and will generally limit our loss should we encounter an unexpected error or loss of Internet connectivity. The general rule whenever you're creating something is to save...

Introducing forever loops

Let's get back to our walking cat animation and set it in perpetual motion. When we do something forever, we constantly repeat it. In Scratch's context, forever means we're going to constantly loop through a series of blocks for as long as the project is running.

Time for action – setting the cat in motion, forever

So far, the cat has moved incrementally across the screen each time we clicked the green flag. Now, we're going to introduce the idea that the cat can stay in motion forever.

  1. We want to wrap the stack of blocks in a forever block. To do this, click on the move (10) steps block in the script and detach it from the when flag clicked.

  2. Now, from the Control palette, snap the forever block onto the when flag clicked block. Grab the stack of blocks you detached and drag it to the center of the forever block. Your script should look like the following screenshot:

  3. Run the script and watch the cat disappear from the stage.

  4. Let's get the runaway cat back. From the Motion palette, add the if on edge, bounce block to the bottom of the forever block. Now, watch the cat reappear upside down and bounce around the bottom-right corner of the stage.

  5. To stop the cat, click once on the script or click on the stop sign above the stage.

The following screenshot shows...

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Description

The book uses step-by-step instructions along with full code listings for each exercise. After each exercise, the author pauses to reflect, explain, and offer insights before building on the project. The author approaches the content with the belief that we are all teachers and that you are reading this book not only because you want to learn, but because you want to share your knowledge with others. Motivated students can pick up this book and teach themselves how to program because the book takes a simple, strategic, and structured approach to learning Scratch. Parents can grasp the fundamentals so that they can guide their children through introductory Scratch programming exercises. It’s perfect for homeschool families. Teachers of all disciplines from computer science to English can quickly get up to speed with Scratch and adapt the projects for use in the classroom.

What you will learn

  • Program in Scratch including universal programming concepts such as loops, conditional statements, variables, arrays, Boolean logic, dynamic interaction, coordination, synchronization, threads, event handling, and procedures
  • Design user interfaces including sequence, characters, and controls
  • Translate a storyline or plot into an online game, animation, or story
  • Debug problems and revise projects to fix problems and add functionality
  • Think critically to solve problems based on need, program limitations, and knowledge levels
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Publication date : Apr 15, 2014
Length: 296 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781782160724
Category :
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Concepts :
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Length: 296 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781782160724
Category :
Programming
Concepts :
Programming Language
Tools :
Scratch

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Table of Contents

12 Chapters
1. Welcome to Scratch 2.0 Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
1. Welcome to Scratch 2.0
About Scratch
Finding a project for you
Using Scratch 2.0
Summary
2. A Quick Start Guide to Scratch Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
2. A Quick Start Guide to Scratch
Joining the Scratch community
Time for action – creating an account on the Scratch website
Time for action – understanding the key features of your account
Taking our first steps in Scratch
Time for action – moving the cat across the stage
Time for action – animating a walking motion with the cat
Time for action – saving our work
Introducing forever loops
Time for action – setting the cat in motion, forever
Time for action – flipping the cat right-side up
Adding sprites to the project
Time for action – adding a second sprite and script
Reviewing a video-sensing project
Time for action – reviewing pop the balloon - video starter
Summary
3. Creating an Animated Birthday Card Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
3. Creating an Animated Birthday Card
Introducing the paint editor
Time for action – painting a happy birthday sprite
Time for action – drawing a vector image
Time for action – using the fill with color tool to paint the stage
Adding gradients
Time for action – applying a gradient
Time for action – adding more sprites to address the card
Initializing a sprite's starting values
Time for action – hiding all sprites when the flag is clicked
Time for action – displaying happy birthday
Specifying memorable names and comments
Time for action – renaming sprites
Inserting comments into our code
Time for action – adding comments to a script
Transforming sprites with graphical effects
Time for action – transforming sprites
Time for action – turning m in a circle
Time for action – making a sprite fade in with the ghost effect
Summary
4. Creating a Scratch Story Book Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
4. Creating a Scratch Story Book
Designing the outline of a barnyard joke book
Time for action – designing a clickable table of contents
Time for action – adding pages to the book
Time for action – adding a sprite to the Backpack
Building a joke with say blocks and sounds
Time for action – making a horse talk with the say block
Time for action – synchronizing and animating the horse
Time for action – importing a horse sound
Positioning a sprite by its coordinates
Time for action – moving the dog based on x and y coordinates
Time for action – duplicating, flipping, and switching a sprite's costume
Composing custom sound effects
Time for action – creating drum sound effects
Time for action – integrating the dog's joke sequence
Navigating the story and coordinating scenes
Time for action – hiding the table of contents
Time for action – displaying the dog scene
Time for action – navigating back to the table of contents
Summary
5. Creating a Multimedia Slideshow Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
5. Creating a Multimedia Slideshow
Importing photos as backdrops
Time for action – importing photos from files
Working with images
Adding slideshow controls to display images
Time for action – flipping through the photos
Playing and recording sounds
Time for action – adding a sound from Scratch's library
Time for action – recording sounds in the sound editor
Editing sounds
Time for action – editing a recorded sound
Time for action – appending a sound
Time for action – adding sound effects to recordings
Using x and y coordinates to find the position of the mouse's pointer
Time for action – using mouse location to hide arrows
Time for action – providing user instructions
Displaying a project in presentation mode
Time for action – presenting a fullscreen slideshow
Summary
6. Making an Arcade Game – Breakout (Part I) Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
6. Making an Arcade Game – Breakout (Part I)
Learning about the Breakout game
Time for action – importing and playing the Pong starter project
Time for action – adding the left and right arrow controls
Time for action – determining if the ball is below the paddle
Time for action – adjusting the center of a sprite costume
Cloning to create identical sprites
Time for action – drawing bricks
Time for action – cloning bricks
Time for action – breaking bricks when I start as a clone
Ricocheting with the point in direction block
Time for action – changing a sprite's direction
Time for action – setting the starting position and the direction
Time for action – ricocheting off bricks
Defining a variable to keep score
Time for action – adding a score variable
Summary
7. Programming a Challenging Gameplay – Breakout (Part II) Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
7. Programming a Challenging Gameplay – Breakout (Part II)
Implementing lives
Time for action – adding a variable to track lives
Time for action – checking for game over
Adding more bricks to the level with a custom block
Time for action – creating a second brick
Time for action – drawing rows of bricks with custom blocks
Time for action – coordinating the ball play
Increasing ball speed and difficulty
Time for action – increasing ball speed
Time for action – decreasing the paddle size based on the clones' costume
Time for action – detecting when we clear the level
Keeping the score using cloud variables
Time for action – keeping a global scoreboard
Summary
8. Chatting with a Fortune Teller Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
8. Chatting with a Fortune Teller
Creating, importing, and exporting lists
Time for action – creating lists to store multiple values
Time for action – importing fortunes to a list
Prompting the player for a question
Time for action – asking a question
Time for action – validating the seeker's question
Time for action – selecting a random fortune
Time for action – counting our fortunes with mod
Time for action – creating a custom say fortune block
Time for action – ensuring grammatically correct questions
Creating a keyword scanner
Time for action – scanning a text string to build a list of words
Summary
9. Turning Geometric Patterns into Art Using the Pen Tool Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
9. Turning Geometric Patterns into Art Using the Pen Tool
Drawing basic shapes
Time for action – drawing our first square
Time for action – building on the square
Time for action – enabling the user to create custom shapes
Time for action – turning triangles into pinwheels
Time for action – creating a custom shapes procedure
Time for action – plotting x,y coordinates to draw a square
Understanding and using color
Time for action – coloring our shapes
Time for action – finding a color picker workaround
Time for action – creating a color palette
Time for action – limiting color values with a slider
Creating asymmetrical patterns
Time for action – creating an explosion
Turning straight lines into string art
Time for action – animating a radar screen
Time for action – breaking out of the circle
Summary
A. Connecting a PicoBoard to Scratch 1.4 Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
A. Connecting a PicoBoard to Scratch 1.4
Using Scratch 1.4, the PicoBoard, and Raspberry Pi
Purchasing the PicoBoard
Time for action – enabling and testing the PicoBoard support in Scratch 1.4
Animating webcam images by detecting sound
Time for action – creating a talking head
Measuring resistance
Time for action – recording the resistance of a thermistor over time
Time for action – charting our measurements
Time for action – revising the graph
Summary
B. Pop Quiz Answers Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Chapter 2, A Quick Start Guide to Scratch
Chapter 3, Creating an Animated Birthday Card
Chapter 4, Creating a Scratch Story Book
Chapter 5, Creating a Multimedia Slideshow
Chapter 6, Making an Arcade Game – Breakout (Part I)
Chapter 9, Turning Geometric Patterns into Art Using the Pen Tool
Appendix A, Connecting a PicoBoard to Scratch 1.4
Index Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Index

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Customer reviews

Rating distribution
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Half star icon 4.3
(4 Ratings)
5 star 50%
4 star 25%
3 star 25%
2 star 0%
1 star 0%
Kyle Willey May 29, 2014
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
The Scratch 2.0 Beginner's guide covers a variety of useful skills and applies them to practical applications created with Scratch. Somewhat unlike most tutorials for Scratch, the book focuses on an adult audience of parents and teachers, rather than just focusing on students in its audience; it is not too complex for students to grasp but it does also focus on giving educators and parents ways to explain the projects and Scratch itself to an audience.Perhaps the most appropriate way to describe this comes out of the author's own foreword, in which he points out that “I did not set out to write a computer science textbook. It's... a tutorial... to learn how to use Scratch to create stories, animations, games, or art.” This is not to say that it does not give a good background, but the focus of each project is notably oriented on practical use of Scratch to achieve goals.The Scratch 2.0 Beginner's Guide is great as a starting point because it covers all the concerns that a novice to Scratch would have, whether they are tech savvy or not-its automatic saving, block structure, and more are all clearly explained in the early chapters.The nature of the tutorials are well-balanced. There's a conscious attempt made to move from novice difficulty to more advanced projects, so the early projects involve simple Scratch activities to demonstrate basic features, replete with in-depth explanations of Scratch's drawing tools and file management system, while the later projects then move on to more scripting heavy projects. It's a good flow throughout, and works well to help acclimate a novice to Scratch in ways that are easy to follow and satisfying to complete.My favorite part of the setup for this book is the way in which it examines Scratch's available tools. It is immediately apparent that the author is fluent with Scratch and knows how to utilize every possible method at his disposal when working in Scratch, and it comes through in the quality of the explanations throughout the book. While some of the tutorials may not be the most glamorous, focusing on seemingly mundane things like animating a birthday card or building a fortune teller, they manage to do a great job of exploiting a variety of the approaches to Scratch programming and providing a basis for understanding the process of programming rather than just using the methods and functions contained in the examples.In short, the Scratch 2.0 Beginner's Guide is set up as a very basic tutorial, but if you're unfamiliar with either programming in general or Scratch in particular and want to teach yourself or a student to use Scratch, it's a great starting point and will help you learn not only the basics of using Scratch but also put you onto the path for more advanced projects with Scratch.Disclaimer: I got a digital reviewer copy of this book from Packt. I was not and will not be financially compensated for writing this review, nor was I pressured to write a positive review.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Heleen Durston Jun 19, 2014
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
“Scratch 2.0 Beginner’s Guide: Second Edition” was written by Michael Badger and provides several projects that engage the reader and encourage exploring the Scratch 2.0 game engine. Scratch 2.0 is a game engine that is maintained by MIT and requires very little programming knowledge. For this reason, Scratch 2.0 is great for children and adults just getting started with creating their own games. The book’s projects are as simple as creating a greeting card and as complex as a unique version of the classic game “Breakout.” I enjoyed trying the projects in the book. Code is provided in download form from Packtpub’s webpage for the book. I found the code a great reference for each project as it was a simple matter to compare your code to the code from the provided download. The Scratch 2.0 engine is available online and in a desktop version. I found myself using both versions, depending on the project. The desktop version makes it very easy to try code that others have written; by providing an “open document” command. If you use the online version of Scratch 2.0 you will need to upload the project; and that didn’t always work for me.The projects that you create include a simple storybook, a multimedia slideshow (which lets you use your own pictures), and a fortune-telling game. My favorite project is the “Breakout” clone. Each project lasts the length of a chapter, except for the “Breakout” clone which lasts two chapters. At the chapter’s end there is a short quiz, whose answers are found in Appendix B. Appendix A provides information on using Scratch with a PicoBoard, and Raspberry Pi.I recommend “Scratch 2.0 Beginner’s Guide: Second Edition” to anyone who is interested in trying Scratch 2.0. By the end of the book you will have enough confidence to start a project of your own. There is an extensive community supporting Scratch 2.0 and they will be happy to provide help with any problems that you might have.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
M. Blair Jun 30, 2014
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon 4
I really enjoyed reading PacktPub's Scratch 2.0 Beginner's Guide: Second Edition -[...] . The book has some fun and useful projects that start easy and build up to more challenging concepts. The projects in the book explain the programming concept first before diving into greater detail by first having the reader create the code in Scratch and then explaining how the code functions step-by-step.Chapter 1 - Welcome to Scratch 2.0 - goes through an overview of Scratch, the projects in the book and basic programming concepts.Chapter 2 - A Quick Start Guide to Scratch - walks the reader through creating an account on the Scratch website, creating a project, using forever loops, repeat blocks and animating sprites.Chapter 3 - Creating an Animated Birthday Card - takes the reader through the process of creating an animated birthday card. The project shows the reader how to use the built-in paint editor to design bitmap and vector images, initialize the sprite and then transform it using graphical effects, loops and broadcasts.Chapter 4 - Creating a Scratch Story Book - shows the reader how to create a barnyard joke book by displaying the joke in a speech bubble, playing sounds, creating sound effects, moving sprites and changing scenes to navigate the book.Chapter 5 - Creating a Multimedia Slideshow - demonstrates how to create a multimedia slideshow by importing personal photos, resizing the images, adding slideshow controls, recording and playing sounds and using the x and y coordinates to locate the mouse.Chapter 6 - Making an Arcade Game - Breakout (Part I) - walks the reader through building a breakout game by customizing a starter project, cloning sprites to add additional game elements, calculating the sprite direction, using conditional statements and creating a variable to keep the score.Chapter 7 - Programming a Challenging Gameplay - Breakout (Part II) - goes through how to expand the Breakout game by including multiple lives and ball speed. The reader will also learn how to create custom code blocks, variables that use cloud data and how to control program flow with Boolean blocks.Chapter 8 - Chatting with a Fortune Teller - shows the reader how to store and retrieve information in lists, prompt the player for input and check for errors, using conditional statements to control the program and how to develop a test plan.Chapter 9 - Turning Geometric Patters into Art Using the Pen Tool - lets the reader explore using the pen to draw polygons, get user input to create custom patterns and how to draw various patterns and string art.Appendix A - Connecting a PicoBoard to Scratch 1.4 - demonstrates how to connect an external PicoBoard to the Scratch 1.4 programming environment so that the reader can use different sensors to monitor and collect environmental data and graph the results.All in all, this is an outstanding book that provides many practical projects to learn programming fundamentals and Scratch. The projects are easy to understand and follow and create a good programming foundation. Each chapter includes a quick quiz at the end to check for learning before moving on. I highly recommend getting this book for anyone that wants to get started with programming and using Scratch.#scratch #gamedev #scratchdev
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Michael Littman Jun 25, 2014
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon 3
I evaluated the book for a class I teach. Overall, it seems to be very high quality. The prose is clear and the diagrams vivid and helpful. The example programs are well chosen: fun to play with and easy to understand.Programming is presented at a very mechanical level---get this block, get that block---much like the instructions you get with Ikea furniture or Lego kits. As a result, beginners will have no trouble following along to get things running. However, I didn't see a clear path for the reader to become an intermediate or advanced programmer. As a result, for my purposes, the book isn't appropriate.
Amazon Verified review Amazon

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About the author

Profile icon Badger
Badger
Michael Badgeris a writer and technical communicator who has worked in a range of technical roles, including support, automated software testing, and project management. He has authored several books for Packt Publishing, including Scratch 1.4 Beginner's Guide. He also authors a regular Scratch column for Raspberry Pi Geek Magazine, which focuses on Scratch 1.4.
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