Hello Scratch!: Learn to Program by Making Arcade Games

Summary

Hello, Scratch! is a how-to book that helps parents and kids work together to learn programming skills by creating new versions of old retro-style arcade games with Scratch.

About the Technology

Can 8-year-olds write computer programs? You bet they can! In Scratch, young coders use colorful blocks and a rich graphical environment to create programs. They can easily explore ideas like input and output, looping, branching, and conditionals. Scratch is a kid-friendly language created by MIT that is a safe and fun way to begin thinking like a programmer, without the complexity of a traditional programming language.

About the Book

Hello Scratch! guides young readers through five exciting games to help them take their first steps in programming. They'll experiment with key ideas about how a computer program works and enjoy the satisfaction of immediate success. These carefully designed projects give readers plenty of room to explore by imagining, tinkering, and personalizing as they learn.

What's Inside

• Learn by experimentation
• Learn to think like a programmer
• Build five exciting, retro-style games
• Visualize the organization of a program

About the Readers

Written for kids 8-14. Perfect for independent learning or working with a parent or teacher.

About the Authors

Kids know how kids learn. Sadie and Gabriel Ford, 12-year-old twins and a formidable art and coding team, wrote this book with editing help from their mother, author Melissa Ford!

Table of Contents

PART 1 - SETTING UP THE ARCADE
1. Getting to know your way around Scratch
2. Becoming familiar with the Art Editor
3. Meeting Scratch's key blocks through important coding concepts
PART 2 - TURNING ON THE MACHINES
4. Designing a two-player ball-and-paddle game
5. Using conditionals to build a two-player ball-and-paddle game
PART 3 - CODING AND PLAYING GAMES
6. Designing a fixed shooter
7. Using conditionals to build your fixed shooter
8. Designing a one-player ball-and-paddle game
9. Using variables to build your one-player ball-and-paddle game
10. Designing a simple platformer
11. Using X and Y coordinates to make a simple platformer
12. Making a single-screen platformer
13. Using arrays and simulating gravity in a single-screen platformer
14. Becoming a game maker

Gabriel Ford is a 12 year old coder. His favorite game, PartiBlu, was featured by the Scratch team on the front page in Winter 2015.

Melissa Ford is the author of numerous works of fiction and non-fiction, including Writing Interactive Fiction with Twine (Pearson, Spring 2016). She is the Blogging and Social Media editor at BlogHer, a contributor at GeekDad, and the interactive fiction mentor at her local computer club.

Sadie Ford is a 12 year old coder. Her favorite game is Astrosmash. She enjoys drawing and reading as well as coding with her twin brother Gabriel.