Introduction to Scratch

UC Santa CruzCMPS 10 – Introduction to Computer Sciencewww.soe.ucsc.edu/classes/cmps010/Spring11ejw@cs.ucsc.edu13 May 2011

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What is Scratch? Scratch is a programming language and environment

Designed to make it easy to learn how to program Programs are fun and graphical

Developed by Lifelong Kindergarten Group @ MIT Media Lab,

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Benefits of Scratch

Can make a wide range of content Interactive stories Animations Games Music and art

Share content Easily share Scratch creations on the Scratch website Over 1.7 million projects shared so far

Easy to learn No need to memorize language syntax Programming language elements are visible on-screen Drag-and-drop to use programming language elements Designed for use by kids 8/9 years old on up

Software is free to use

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Sprites

Sprites are anything visual you see on screen.

Each Sprite has an associated block of program code.

Box of available sprites

On-screen sprite

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Scripts

Clicking on a sprite brings up its associated code (middle pane)Script pane (code

pane)

This code controls how this sprite moves

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How to program

Drag and dropcode blocks intocode pane

Can be free floating, or connect to other sequences of code

Can also select and move code from code pane to remove

Double-click on code block to execute – you’ll see results in the upper right window

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Different kinds of statements

Different buttons in the upper left window bring up different programming blocks

Click a button here to bring up different code blockshere

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Downloading Scratch

Scratch is freely available, and works on Windows, Macintosh, and Ubuntu Linux

scratch.mit.edu Main website for Scratch

http://scratch.mit.edu/download URL for downloading Scratch

Video tutorials http://info.scratch.mit.edu/Video_Tutorials