Let's start out journey!
As every story, this one also has its beginning. Here we will show you the gate to the powerful tool that will let you create your own magical worlds. As a first step we are going to briefly introduce you to Scratch working environment by exploring different sections of Scratch editor. To create animated story or the game you must add instruction so that actors that plays on the stage knows what to do.
Actors
In Scratch actors are represented by sprites, which ares pictures displayed on the screen, that follows your commands. By default Scratch starts with a cat sprite for every new project but we will create our own here in the next lessons.. Area on the right bottom part of screen is called sprite pane. Here you can add the sprite, remove the sprite and browse all the sprites added to your project. Sprites added to the project are visible on the stage.
Stage
On the stage we can see result of the sprite following computer program build of commands put together in the code area on the left hand side of the screen.
The stage, same as in the theater, has its background that can be personalized by adding different backdrops from the backdrops library located in the right bottom corner of the screen.
Writing the code
You can give commands to the sprite by building up the blocks sequence in the code area which can be found in the center of the screen. Instructions represented by the blocks are ment to be a specific tasks to be berformed by our actors. We can see all the blocks in the block pallet located on the left side of the screen. You can think of it as of chest of drawers containing instructions for your sprites. You can see that blocks falls into bunch of categories with its own colors assigned. Those reflects a drowers of our chest where each drawer keeps commands of different fassion, like motion where you move your character, sound where you can make some noise, control where you can drive your sprite movements and so on. You can change the category by simply clicking in category name in the very left of the block pallet.
Let's now switch to the yellow which is “events” and drag “when green flag clicked” into the code area. That will connect our program with green flag from stage view. You can think of code area with all its instructions as of the brain of your actor. It is going behave as we tell him to do. Now lets switch to dark blue which is “motion” and drag “move 10 steps” block attaching it to existing one. It is crutial to know that the order of blocks in our code areae is very important.
Action
To start your program, let’s click green flag located in stage area so let’s do it couple of times. As you could notice each time you click the flag our sprite is moving by 10 steps. You can play with diferent values in here and let’s take negative numbers into account too. The red button next to green flag stops your program and the button on the right side of stage area makes a stage to be displayed full screen.
When we are done with our program we most likely would like to save our work. In order to do that, you have to click on a File menu and select Save now to save the project on your Scratch account or Save to your computer to download the project file. This way you can start working on your project next time.
We hope this short article was useful for you and we wish you happy scratching!
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