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(58 reviews)
Author: The LEAD Project
ISBN : 1593274092
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An Excerpt from the Foreword
"Scratch is more than a piece of software. It is part of a broader educational mission. We designed Scratch to help young people prepare for life in today's fast-changing society. As young people create Scratch projects, they are not just learning how to write computer programs. They are learning to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively—essential skills for success and happiness in today's world.
As you read this book, let your imagination run wild. What will you create with Scratch?"
—Professor Mitchel Resnick, Director, MIT Scratch Team, MIT Media Lab
About the Author
The Learning through Engineering, Art, and Design (LEAD) Project is an educational initiative established to encourage the development of creative thinking through the use of technology. Created by The Hong Kong Federation of Youth Groups in collaboration with the MIT Media Lab, the LEAD project promotes hands-on, design-based activities to foster innovation, problem solving skills, and technical literacy.
Direct download links available for Free Super Scratch Programming Adventure!: Learn to Program By Making Cool Games
- Paperback: 160 pages
- Publisher: No Starch Press (August 30, 2012)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1593274092
- ISBN-13: 978-1593274092
- Product Dimensions: 0.5 x 6.8 x 9.4 inches
- Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Free Super Scratch Programming Adventure!: Learn to Program By Making Cool Games
This book's subtitle is "Learn to program by making cool games!" but let me say right at the start: this book doesn't really teach you how to program in general. Instead it teaches you how to program the Scratch game programming environment.
Scratch is a mostly drag-and-drop environment that lets you build simple animations, play sounds, and determine when objects overlap. The book walks you through creating some very simple games such as making characters walk around the screen, collecting "dimensional strings" without getting zapped, dodging bad guys in a maze, and battling dark wizards in space.
The games are corny but don't let the simplicity of the storyline fool you. Although the games seem simple, they introduce important programming concepts. They show how to use variables, loops, events, broadcast messages, sprites, animation, timing, pseudorandom numbers, sound, and more. They also show how to use the Scratch programming environment to build programs, edit images, and interact with the user.
After reading this book and working through the example games, you won't know how to program in general-purpose languages such as Java, C++, C#, or Visual Basic, but you will know some of the fundamentals needed to understand those languages so learning them should be a bit easier. There are many differences between Scratch's drag-and-drop approach and those other languages, which require much more typing, but Scratch may provide a gentle and entertaining introduction to programming concepts. And you just might end up writing some games that are fun enough to be worth playing more than once.
The book's forward says Scratch is designed for ages 8 and up, and that seems about right.
Learn by doing simple games. This is not a book that teaches programming concepts. It just shows you some really simple games you can construct yourself. But key elements of modern programming are there: blocks, event dispatch, listeners, along with usual variables and control statements. The language scratch makes it easy to write these since you cut and past graphic elements and fill in the blanks (loop limits or comparisons). This book gives you a series of 9 games to write and gives you the code. the games are simple but just what kids like: sprites move around and interact with objects in a single window. I sat with my kids after the first couple chapters once they were hooked to give them concepts like dont' re-write a simmilar peice of code when you already have a debugged one you could cut and past. I explained the idea of why we separate a listener and event (the book doesn't explain the abstraction just the practical use of them, since you have to have the sprite objects send messages to each other when they do something). They immediately got the idea of X and Y coordinates from this when they had struggled with that in homework.
I have to say I was not impressed with the book when I first flipped through it. it seemed too simple. But I recalled that I learned when I was little from a game book too. But Holy cow! I was surprised when this went down as easy as a bowl of fruit loops. The kids think of programming as a game now and beg to get more programming time instead of their other video games. They write their own code for fun then and it's of course terrible in design-- then we sit together and try to think of a better design. perfect! So this book knows its audience better than I did.