First steps with Scratch
Scratch
Scratch is both a programming language with a simple interface that allows young people to create digital stories, games and animations using block programming, and it is also the largest programming community for boys and girls in the world. Scratch is designed, developed and moderated by the Scratch Foundation, a non-profit organization, which offers it openly and free in more than 70 languages.
Scratch has been developed specifically for young people between 8 and 16 years old, although people of any age can participate in the project.
An online version of the tool is available on its website, accessible without the need for any type of registration.
We will use the offline tool called SCRATUX . It will allow to save and load our projects without any type of registration.
To change the language to English look at the picture:
Scratch is multi-platform free software, thus guaranteeing its universal accessibility.
Interface
Scratch home screen
We will use the Offline version of Scratch 3.0 called Scratux, but the interface is similar in other versions.
- Menu bar: at the top left, where we can choose the language, save or load our projects or access various tutorials.
- Code, costumes and sounds tabs: on the left, from where we can choose the code blocks to execute and choose and edit costumes and sounds associated with our different objects.
- Program running window: at the top right. There we will see the result of the program.
- Sprites and Stage windows: at the bottom right. There we will choose the different sprites that we want our program to include. A sprite would be an element of our program to which a behavior and therefore a code is associated. They can be characters, buttons, arrows, etc...Also the stages in which we want our objects to be placed, and which can also have associated code changing or sounding in one way or another as we program it.