Scratch Book
Scratch 1.4 Beginner's Guide
Scratch is developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten group at MIT as an educational aid to help educators teach critical skills, such as design, analysis, logic, collaboration, troubleshooting, and yes, computer programming. When you hear the Scratch Team talk about the language’s benefits, they says things like, “it has a low floor and high ceiling.”
That means Scratch is accessible for eight year old students and beneficial enough to be used as a first programming language for 18 and 48 year old students alike.
The biggest requirement for students is an imagination and the ability to make their imagination play out on the Scratch stage. Everything else is included: sprites (characters), stackable blocks of commands, sounds, graphics editors, and a syntax-error free environment to make it all work together.
That’s right the emphasis is on creating games, interactive art, animated stories, and multimedia projects, not syntax. If the blocks fit together, it’ll run.
Look, I’ll level with you. We call Scratch a programming language and it makes a great first programming language. But how many eight year old kids do you know who are asking to learn how to write computer programs?
Let’s reframe Scratch as a fun technology that you can use to spark your children or students’ imagination. It’s a tool to get them to engage in a variety of subjects, such as math, science, english, family vacation photos, and 4H projects. It just happens to be a technology that will teach you programming concepts such as loops, booleans, sequences, events, variables, and stuff.
About Scratch 1.4 Beginner’s Guide
We’re all teachers whether we want to be or not. That’s why I worked hard to make sure this book was accessible to everyone who wanted to teach someone else how to program using Scratch. The educational theory is built into Scratch. The book demonstrates the theory and programming basics by creating several hands-on projects.
Even if you’ve never written a computer program before, this book will guide you through your first programming language. You’ll wonder why you didn’t do it sooner. The books approach is simple: Do. Reflect. Experiment.
The code for all projects is built block-by-block, documented, and explained. You’re free to remix and reuse these projects in our own teachings. That is the Scratch way.
You will Learn
Here are my promises to you:
- Design user interfaces, including sequence, characters, and controls.
- Think critically and make decisions – based on need, program limitations and knowledge level.
- Get to know the concepts of scratch programming such as loops, conditional statements, variables, arrays, Boolean logic, dynamic interaction, coordination, synchronization, threads, and event handling, and apply it later to other programming languages.
- Develop a barnyard humor that let’s you shine as a storyteller.
- Debug problems in your design and code.
- Revise your projects to fix problems and add functionality.
- Collaborate with the Scratch community by remixing and sharing projects so that you can learn from each other.
- Communicate with peers and students about the details of your projects.
- Capture sound, light, touch, and resistance via an external PicoBoard and use it as input for your Scratch projects.
