What this book covers

Chapter 1 provides an overview of Scratch, its features, and how it can help you teach 21st century learning skills to your children and students.

Chapter 2 guides us through the installation of Scratch on Windows, OS X, and Linux. This chapter also helps you run the Scratch programming environment from a USB flash drive.

Chapter 3 explores the Scratch interface and allows us to create some simple scripts that demonstrate how easily we can build a project. This is a high-speed tour of Scratch that gets us tinkering and thinking about what's possible.

Chapter 4 teaches us how to create an animated birthday card and a slideshow of our favorite photos.

Chapter 5 allows us to horse around as we develop a barnyard humor book that lets us narrate multiple scenes. There's no need to hold the applause.

Chapter 6 takes a classic pong game and gives it a little personality by adding a troll, switching levels, and keeping score.

Chapter 7 takes us to the fortune-teller, but before we learn the random answers to all our deepest questions, we must create our game using the Magic 8 ball's fortunes.

Chapter 8 uses mathematical formulas and graphs to help us answer the question, "Would you rather have a dollar that doubles every day or a lump sum of money?" The answer may surprise you.

Chapter 9 explains how to share your project with the Scratch community and how to promote it to you friends and fans.

Chapter 10shows us how to connect a webcam and an external sensor board to our computer and delivers real-world stimuli as input to Scratch projects.