Scratch

Scratch is an exciting programming environment designed for young people from the age of eight to learn to program cool computer applications that can be easily shared with their peers.

Scratch is free to all and these pages provide resources for parents, teachers, and computer club facilitators to structure the learning experience for children as young as six years old to begin programming in Scratch. A lesson plan has been designed that allows children to creatively explore building applications with Scratch but ensures that they also learn many of the fundamental principles of computer programming.

This is the first release of these notes (June 4th 2007) and a windows helpfile is available for you to download and distribute as you like.

The notes are currently being revised to make them a more useful resource for helping novice programmers learn scratch. A series of sample projects with full notes (for the trainer) is being devised for release in early 2008. The first project is now available:

• Fish! - a simple game for novice scratch programmers with full notes.

Scratch is easy for adults to learn and following these coursenotes for just a couple of hours should allow most parents and teachers to be in a good position to teach young children to program. The notes assume a familiarity with computers and act as a framework both to teach you how to program in Scratch, and to provide a structure for passing on your knowledge to others.

The first four lessons can be mastered by children as young as six years old although a careful selection of project suggestions for them to build is needed to maintain their interest and motivation to build applications. Please email any comments or notes for suggested improvements or additions to these notes to sync@redware.com.

You may download Scratch for free from MIT at their Scratch website (http://scratch.mit.edu) which also acts as a portal for you to download and share applications. Please read our overview of scratch or get started right away with our lesson plan:

Build a simple onkey application to move a sprite around the stage with the arrow keys.

Use a forever loop for the sprite to keep moving around the stage with some random movements and learn a little more about the Scratch environment.

Use conditional statements to control program flow in repeat, while, and if statements and create a simple game where a predator eats it's prey.

Use variables to draw squirals and investigate turtle graphics further and create asteroids type continuous movement control.

Lesson 5 - Messages

Sprites are controlled independently of each other and can interact with each other when touching. Broadcasting messages allows communication between sprites and the stage to control several backgrounds within an application.