Overview
Excerpt From Book 1: “This first book in the series is written for beginners. We’re starting from nothing and teaching everything you’ll need to know to get started. We’ll introduce all of the components of Scratch, where to find them and how to use them. We provide a series of projects that can take someone from no experience with coding through to producing their own simple projects, and importantly, inspire them to create.”
Chapter Abstracts
Chapter 1 – Why This Series? – 9 pages
I wrote this series to try to help address the tremendous changes happening in education as it attempts to incorporate coding into the standard curriculum. It is important that we recognize these challenges, and opportunities, and look at the broad picture before we get caught up in the fine details of an applied skill. While every era within memory has had educators struggle to adapt to new technology and changes in society, the rate and scale of change we face today is unparalleled. It is natural that educators feel overwhelmed or lost in the turmoil. The hope is that this series can offer not only theory and explanation of why these changes are necessary but also practical steps to tackle the challenge. My objective is to give some view to the future, the goals, the purpose that we are reaching for as a society, but also the grounding in applied skills that you will use to build a practice around that can help you transform your classroom into a training ground for world changers.
Chapter 2 – Why Coding? – 6 pages
For most educators, there probably isn’t much of an option on this. Coding is being added as a curriculum requirement for schools in most jurisdictions. But we don’t need to have an attitude of resignation about it. It is a good thing, and hopefully through this book you’ll come to see not only the benefit to our students for learning coding but also how it can be a fun and engaging tool you can enjoy using in your classroom paired with other subjects.
Chapter 3 – Why Scratch? – 13 pages
By this point we’ve made our arguments why we need to teach coding in schools and why educators need to know how to code. But why Scratch? Why is it the right tool for the job? There are dozens of computer languages and coding websites, so what makes Scratch our choice as the best tool for educators to work with teaching this critical new skill? Let’s take a look at some of the great features of Scratch and why I think it wins as the best way to teach coding, hands down.
Chapter 4 – Scratch Basics – 37 pages
In this chapter, we’ll go over a bunch of the concepts and structures in Scratch to introduce you to how it works and how to think in Scratch terms. We’ll cover the basic components in Scratch, how each basically functions and how you can influence them, and clarify terms we’ll be using in the rest of the book. We’ll have some callbacks later in the book when we’re dealing with particularly relevant applications to the principles outlined here.
Chapter 5 – Defining Beginner Scratch – 2 pages
It’s generally easy to define a beginning – it’s the part with nothing before it – but here we aren’t just looking at the start of things but the mindset and approach we want to take with learners early on the path to coding. What does beginner Scratch look like? What does it include? What does it not include? What is the focus, and what are the goals we should have in mind for beginners? Every learner is unique, so of course there aren’t strict definitions we can rely on, but we can have a mindset for how we approach the topic. Later in the book, you’ll find I’ve provided additional challenges for the more advanced students you might have, so here we’ll stick to generalities.
Chapter 6 – Beginner Project 1: Dino Dance Party – 17 pages
In our first project, we take things nice and slow. We’ll be making a simple music-and-animation show using pre-made art. The project will consist of a few dinosaur characters, and the player will be able to press keys to have each one animate and play music. I’ll walk you through how and where to find all the different tools in Scratch needed to make your first project. It should take less than one hour for you to complete and will provide you a good sense of how to make simple projects and find the major features of Scratch.
Chapter 7 – Beginner Project 2: Fireworks Display – 17 pages
Our second project focuses on the artistic side of Scratch. We’ll be creating a fireworks display, letting the player time the launches of fireworks to their arrangement. Here we’ll be expanding on our knowledge of Scratch by looking into the Costumes tab more while reinforcing our earlier work with animation, using more motion and graphical effects. It will take less than an hour for beginners to find their way through, but the design is open-ended to make as complicated a firework show as the user wants, using the same fundamental techniques.
Chapter 8 – Beginner Project 3: Batty Flaps – 15 pages
This project is a clone of the popular Flappy Bird game that took the world by storm in 2014. In this project, we’ll learn to make a player-controlled character affected by gravity that can flap to rise up, needing to pass through randomly positioned gates to proceed and earn points. In addition to the basic gameplay programming, we’ll explore some graphic creation and include a title and Game Over screen to break up the gameplay. The programming and graphics for this game should take an adult around 30 minutes to create.
Chapter 9 – Beginner Project 4: Butterfly Catching – 17 pages
For our final project in this book, we’re going to take our game-making to the next level with some more logic and controls. It will feature a butterfly flying around the screen for the player to click on. However, each time they succeed, a beetle will spawn (appear) and also run around the screen. If they click on the beetle, they’ll lose a life. How long can the player succeed in a game that gets harder as they play? In around 30 minutes, for an adult, you should end up with a fun and challenging simple game great for young students while also providing training to use some of the most important techniques in coding.
Chapter 10 – Beginner Check-In – 14 pages
Now that we’ve completed the four beginner projects, let’s stop and reflect on our progress. We’ll go over the key techniques and concepts we’ve worked with in our beginner projects, then we’ll discuss teaching practices.
Chapter 11 – Follow-Up: Extending the Projects – 4 pages
You may have noticed while building the projects that some things could be done differently. Maybe a feature you thought should be there was missing, maybe the myriad of techniques we showed could be simplified to your one favourite method, or some other changes. These projects were built with plenty of room for improvement in mind. Some were simplified to fit the learning curve, or to provide a diversity of concepts, or even to fit a more linear path of development while retaining usability at every stage. There were a lot of considerations to make while building the example projects, and having them calling out for you to make them your own was always planned for and intentionally put there to inspire you to try improving them.
Chapter 12 – Troubleshooting Scratch – 15 pages
Perhaps nothing strikes fear into teachers told to integrate coding into their classroom more than the thought of dealing with bugs, errors, and computer trouble. Admittedly, coding can throw a lot of surprises at you. Earlier, we even said bugs are a part of the process. This might not be very reassuring talk, but just like coding itself, we can prepare ourselves for these eventualities. Here’s some advice for the most common problems faced in the classroom when teaching with Scratch, in an attempt to arm you with the knowledge and practice to overcome most of the potential issues you’ll face.
Chapter 13 – The Next Step in Your Coding Journey – 2 pages
Now that you’ve completed our beginner-level training, don’t feel like you’re on your own! We’ve got more training to support you. In Book 2, we cover off intermediate Scratch. This book will help take those who have developed a basic familiarity and comfort with Scratch through large and more complex projects, where we’ll explore a lot more coding techniques and skills.
Chapter 14 – Final Thoughts – 2 pages
So that’s it for now. Hopefully, you’ve enjoyed the book and feel confident about using it with your classroom. There will always be more to learn and try, but if you’ve gotten through the four projects, you’re well on your way and should know enough to handle introducing Scratch to your students. Scratch is an amazing tool, and with it you’ll be able to unleash your students’ potential as well as your own.
Where to Buy It
Book 1 – Beginner
Routledge(Publisher)
Barnes & Noble (US Bookstore)
Amazon (US Bookstore)
Indigo (Canadian Bookstore)
Blackwell’s (British Bookseller)
Waterstones (British Bookseller)
Angus & Robertson (Australian Bookstore)
FNAC (French Bookstore)
Thalia (German Bookstore)
Project Links
Book 1 – Beginner Projects:
