_{Lesson 1}An introduction

To start with you are going to get to know Scratch. Take a few minutes to have a look around and familiarise yourself with it.

Scratch is a computer programming language. Computer programming languages or programming languages require you to think logically about solving a problem. Scratch is a programming language too, which is designed to help you think like a computer programmer. Scratch teaches you some of the basics of computer programming. You will gain computational thinking skills from using Scratch as well as develop further problem-solving skills.

The web version of Scratch automatically saves everything you do, so don't worry about clicking the save button each time.

If you need to download your project, you can do so at any time by clicking the File and then "Save to your computer" option at the top left.

When you want to restore it, just click the "Load from your computer" option in the same place and find your file.

In Scratch, the area where we see our program, game or animation happening is called the stage. A character or object within the stage is called a sprite. We call the background of the stage the backdrop.

When we make a Scratch project, we build it using a bunch of blocks put in a certain order or sequence. You can find these blocks under the different tabs on the left-hand side of the screen.

There are several categories of these blocks. We have:

• Motion
• Looks
• Sound
• Events
• Control
• Sensing
• Operators
• Variables
• My Blocks

An event is an action that happens that causes a computer program to do something. A real-life action, for example, is that the school bell rings. The action would cause the pupils to go to the next class.

Computers rely on these events to be able to act. In Scratch, there are a quite a few events under the Events tab.

Scratch has several actions that cause events to happen. These actions and events can be found under the Events tab on the left side of the Scratch interface.

To start our Scratch animation, game or program, we need to create an event at the top.

Normally, we use the when clicked event to start our Scratch game.

A sprite is basically any object or character in your Scratch stage. For example, the cat is a sprite.

We can add more sprites by clicking the button at the bottom right. This will bring up a list of sprites. For this task you will need to add another sprite.

When you click this button, you will be shown all the sprites available:

In this lesson we will be learning about sprites and backdrops in Scratch.

We can create our own sprites in Scratch. To do this, select Costumes at the top.

Once you have the screen above, we are going to change the appearance of the cat.

The tools to the left side of the sprite allow us to change the appearance of sprite. Try them out so that you get an idea as to what they all do.

You can change your sprite's appearance however you want using these tools – it's entirely up to you. Be creative!

Now we are going to make our character change costumes. We can change the costume of our characters by clicking on one of them on the left. At the moment we have only changed the first costume.

To change the second costume, we need to click on the one that says costume2 (note that the name might be different depending on the name of the sprite, for example the Bat will have different costumes).

Change the second costume to look similar to the previous one. For example, in the example shown you can see that the cat has red eyes, for the second costume the cat would also have to have red eyes.

We do this because otherwise when the character changes costume they would look very different. We want them to remain mostly the same.

Once you have changed your sprite, we are now going to change the backdrop of our stage.

Click the Choose a Backdrop icon at the bottom right of the screen until you get a screen like the following screen:

At the top right you can search for a backdrop. When you have found a backdrop you are happy with, click it.