PREPARE YOUR KIDS FOR TOMORROW
INTRODUCTION
Playing video games is fun, but programming your own video games is a creative, challenging skill that will let you make your own fun. The free Scratch programming environment gives everyone an easy way to learn programming skills. While Scratch is primarily designed for 8- to 16-year-olds, it’s used by people of all ages, including younger children with their parents and college students learning their first programming language. There’s so much that you can do with Scratch, it’s hard to know where to start. That’s where this course comes in. This course guides you through creating several video games in Scratch. By building the projects in this course, you’ll get a good idea of which blocks are commonly used to create video games in Scratch. These projects provide a solid foundation for you to build upon when creating your own original programs.
Scratch is the best educational programming software available today. No other tool makes programming as easy as Scratch does. Many similar products have been inspired by Scratch, but Scratch remains the most popular. With Scratch, you can create interactive games, animations, and science projects, all while having lots of fun!
ABOUT THIS COURSE
Each project walks you through programming a single game, and programming concepts are explained as they come up. You’ll start by sketching out what the final game will look like and planning the main parts of the parts of the program. The sections that follow will cover how to code each of these parts step-by-step until you’ve built the full game. After building the main game, you’ll have the option of adding special features and cheat modes.
Project 1: Rainbow Lines in Space!, you’ll create an animated art project using basic code blocks and several sprites working together. You’ll also learn about directions and degrees.
Project 2: Maze Runner, you’ll make a maze game in which the player uses the keyboard to change the cat’s coordinates and guide it through eight different maze levels.
Project 3: Shooting Hoops with Gravity shows you how to make a basketball game that implements realistic gravity for jumping cats and falling basketballs.
Project 4: A Polished Brick Breaker Game covers simple techniques for taking a plain brick breaker game and turning it into a polished, exciting game with animations, sound effects, and more.
Project 5: Snaaaaaake! features the classic computer game in which the player guides an ever-growing snake around the screen. It explains how to use Scratch’s sprite cloning feature to make the stretching snake body.
Project 6: Fruit Slicer, you’ll make a clone of the hit smartphone game Fruit Ninja, in which the player slices fruit in mid-air.
Project 7: Asteroid Breaker . . . in Space! features a clone of the classic space shooter Asteroids. You’ll add mouse and keyboard controls to the spaceship.
