The Book of Scratch

Scratch is a graphical programming language from MIT's Media Lab that's designed especially for young people. Students control graphics, music, and more by snapping together blocks, much like LEGO bricks or pieces of a puzzle, dragging-and-dropping blocks to create programs. Scratch is used in many schools to teach kids the basics of programming in a novel and fun way, and the Scratch website alone showcases over 1,000,000 Scratch projects. The Book of Scratch is a full-color, illustrated guide to programming with Scratch that teaches kids how to make cool projects, like joke-telling sock puppets and a car racing game. Young people can use Scratch's intuitive, graphical interface to create or tweak interactive stories, games, animations, music, and art. Each chapter takes the reader through a game or other project that teaches a key programming concept, like variables, message passing, and loops. As kids work through projects like a side-scrolling octopus adventure and interactive versions of classic games like Rock, Paper, Scissors, they learn programming by doing.