Scratch – Session One

Hi Everybody,

Here is some further information from the session on Wednesday that you might find useful. If you have any questions please send us an email to

email-address

Or else just give us a shout at the start of the next session.

Scratch Website

Firstly please have a good look through the Scratch website:

You should have a look through some of the Featured Projects on the Homepage – this will give you an idea about some of the different types of programs you can create yourself.

The next most important part of the website is the Support Section. If you have a printer at home it would be useful to print and read the Getting Started Guide and once you have mastered that you should take a look at the Scratch Reference Guide – it will be very useful to you over the coming weeks, try to get a copy printed out.

Running and Reusing Other People’s Programs

Spend some time getting practice downloading and running other people’s programs.

For example to download the sample “About Me” project you could just type “about me” in the search in the top right of the Scratch website:

CoderDojo-Scratch-Website_01

Then you will get a list of links that contain “About Me” projects, pick the second link “About Me Sample Projects”

CoderDojo-Scratch-Website_02

Pick the second sample project:

CoderDojo-Scratch-Website_03

Now to the most important part – look at the top right of the page and you will see “Download the sprites and scripts of …..”:

CoderDojo-Scratch-Website_05

When you click the “About Me” link your web browser should automatically download the program into Scratch running on your PC. You can now edit this and re-use the existing code. (You might need to download the file to you PC and then open it with Scratch – please let us know next Wednesday if you have any problem downloading somebody else’s file and opening it in your Scratch editor)

Presentations

Here are the links to the two Scratch presentations we did on Wednesday night:

Session #1 – Introduction to Scratch

Session #2 – About Me

My About Me Example

Here is how I put my “About Me” project together.

Step 1 – Pick 3 things about myself that I would like to show people. I have picked playing with my daughters, listening to the Gummy Bear song and feeding our cat.

Step 2 – Pick a background – we call this a Stage in Scratch, I have chosen a Park – so I want to download an image from the Internet of my local park.

Step 3 – Gather up images or sounds that you want to put into your project, I collected images of my daughers, myself, Barbie, the Gummy Bear and our cat. Each image will be a Sprite in Scratch, a Sprite can do anything you program it to.

Step 4 – Start a new project in Scratch. Open up Scratch, Click the File menu, then New.

Step 5 – Insert your chosen background picture as the Stage for the project. Click Stage in the botton right of the Scratch screen:

CoderDojo-Scratch-Website_06

Now in the main panel click Backgrounds:

CoderDojo-Scratch-Website_07

Now click Import to bring in the picture you would like, browse to the folder on your PC that contains all of your pictures:

CoderDojo-Scratch-Website_08

You should now see your chosen background on the Stage:

CoderDojo-Scratch-Website_09

We will not be using the Cat in this project so you can delete that Sprite – just right clck on the cat in the bottom left of the screen and press Delete:

CoderDojo-Scratch-Website_10

Step 6 – Add in the Sprites for your project, we will import our Sprites from a file:

CoderDojo-Scratch-Website_12

I want to make the picture smaller so I will edit its costume, click Costumes, Edit and then the Shrink button shown:

CoderDojo-Scratch-Website_13

It is a good idea to give each Sprite a name, I have just called mine PJ:

CoderDojo-Scratch-Website_14

Do the same for the other Sprites you would like to include.

CoderDojo-Scratch-Website_15

Step 7 – Make your Sprites do something interesting. There are many different things you can do here – have a look at my simple example to get some ideas for your own projects.

Homework

Please put your own “About Me” together and try to upload it to the Scratch website.

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