Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
Adventure
3
Creating Stories and
Games with Scratch
IF YOU CAN
put together a jigsaw puzzle, you can create a computer program using
Scratch! With just a few clicks, you can have a bat fly around a castle, make a ninja
sneak past a guard or conjure up a flock of butterflies floating through a garden.
Scratch was developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab
to help young students learn basic control and programming concepts (
http://
scratch.mit.edu
)
. It is free to use and has become very popular throughout the
world. here is even an International Scratch Day, which is held every year to celebrate
and share the things people have created using the language.
Scratch is a graphical programming language. his means that, instead of writing text
commands, you connect blocks of code together to make a script that makes some-
thing happen. You can use Scratch to create interactive stories and computer games in
which you draw the scenery (called the
stage
) and the characters (called
sprites
). You
can also create music and art with Scratch.
In this adventure, you'll begin by creating the Scratch equivalent of a typical Hello
World! computer program and making Scratch Cat say “Hello”. After that, you'll create
a program with a monkey who moves around the screen and changes his facial expres-
sion. Finally, you'll create an entire role-playing game incorporating a variety of back-
grounds and diferent ways to win points.
