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Scratch 2.0 Beginner's Guide
Create digital stories, games, art, and animations through six unique projects 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. As 21st century people, we live a digital life, but computer scientists around the world warn of a declining pool of digitally literate computer science students. The Scratch environment makes it fun for students of any age to think, create, and collaborate digitally. Scratch 2.0 Beginner's Guide Second Edition will teach you how to become a Scratch programmer and lay the foundation for programming in any computer language. Whether you are creating a birthday card or cloning bricks for a game of Breakout, projects are approached in a step-by-step way to help you design, create, and reflect on each programming exercise.
284 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2014
2 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
June 30, 2014
An Excellent Intro to Scratch 2.0
I really enjoyed reading PacktPub's Scratch 2.0 Beginner's Guide: Second Edition - http://bit.ly/SaViiV . 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
I really enjoyed reading PacktPub's Scratch 2.0 Beginner's Guide: Second Edition - http://bit.ly/SaViiV . 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
July 18, 2014
“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.
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.
June 7, 2016
This is an okay book, it promises an introduction to scratch, and does so in a fairly complete way. And it's written in a way that it shows examples, and challenges the reader to try things out on his own. However if you have some experience with scratch already, then this book will be less interesting and you'll switch to a more 'diagonal' reading mode. But on the other hand this book is also not very suitable for a young audience either, since there's quite a lot of text in it, and it's written like a real 'tech' book.
Other than that, the contents is fine, correct and complete and the book is still up to date.
Other than that, the contents is fine, correct and complete and the book is still up to date.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews