View a basic demo of Scratch, either through a live demo or through the Scratch overview video.

A large range of projects are available online to inspire you. Spend some time viewing sample projects. The Scratch website has many interesting examples.

Begin your Scratch experience by working through the following simple steps, making the Scratch animated sprite, a cat, dance:

• Start by dragging the “move 10 steps” block from the “Motion” blocks palette to the scripting area. Every time you click on the block the cat moves a distance of 10 steps. You can change the number to make the cat move a greater or shorter distance.
• From the “Sound” palette, drag the “Play drum” block. Click on the block to hear its drum sound. Drag and snap the “play drum” block below the “move“ block. When you click on this stack of two blocks, the cat will move and then play the drum sound.
• Copy this stack of blocks (either using the Duplicate toolbar item or by right clicking the stack and selecting “duplicate”) and snap the copy to the already placed blocks.
• Change the second “move” block to -10 steps, so the cat moves backward. Every time the stack of four blocks is clicked, the cat does a little dance forward and back.
• Go to the “Control” blocks palette and grab the “repeat” block. Wrap the “repeat” block around the other blocks in the scripting area. Now when you click on the stack, the cat dances forward and back 10 times.
• Finally, drag the “when Sprite clicked” block and snap it to the top of the stack. Click on the cat (instead of the blocks stack) to make the cat dance.

 Based on: CREATIVE COMPUTING a design-based introduction to computational thinking

Explain to a classmate what you are figuring out during the 10 minutes and ask others for help when you need it.

Find out whether anyone in the class or group has figured out:

• how to add sound
• how to change the background
• how to access the help screens for particular blocks.

Explain your code to others and ask questions about unfamiliar code constructs that other groups have used.

Physical programming through the Scratch interface

Write some Scratch code on paper and get a classmate to physically walk it through to show understanding of a certain part of Scratch.

Apply these instructions to highlight parallelism (things happening at the same time) and events (one thing causing another thing to happen):

• Have one person do one thing (like walk across the room).
• Have that person “reset”.
• Have that person do two things simultaneously (like walk across the room and talk).
• Add the second person, by having the second person simultaneously (but independently) do a task, like talking.
• Have the second person do a dependent task, like responding to the first person instead of talking over them.

Apply your Pass-it-on Story

Work in pairs

The pass-it-on story is a Scratch project that is started by a pair of people and then passed on to two other pairs to extend and reimagine it.

You can start your story however you want to, focusing on characters, scene, or plot. Each pair has 10 minutes to work on their contribution to the collaborative project before the groups rotate.

Based on: CREATIVE COMPUTING a design-based introduction to computational thinking