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Repeat

July 19, 2016 Written by Keith Atkinson

In Drawing a square we used the commands “move 50 steps” and “turn clockwise 90 degrees” four times each. To shorten this task we can use the repeat command. Wrapping blocks in a repeat allows us to reuse the logic. Draw a Circle A computer can only draw straight lines, but we can create the […]

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Common Tasks

July 18, 2016 Written by Keith Atkinson

Command Action Start a sequence of commands running when the flag above the stage is clicked. Go forward a number of steps (or backward for negative steps) Rotate pen to right Rotate pen to left Clear the drawing Return pen to the middle of screen Do not draw a line as sprite moves Draw a […]

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Drawing a Square

July 16, 2016 Written by Keith Atkinson

This tutorial is based off an excerpt from The Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Coding Using Scratch hard copies and digital copies can be purchased on Amazon Drawing in Scratch is a lot like drawing with a pen and paper, except in order to draw something in Scratch, you have to tell the computer in which […]

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Scratch – Basic Program

July 16, 2016 Written by Keith Atkinson

This tutorial is based off an excerpt from The Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Coding Using Scratch hard copies and digital copies can be purchased on Amazon On the Scratch website, click the Create menu item at the top of the web page. When you first open Scratch you will see something similar to the sketch […]

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Arrays

July 12, 2016 Written by Keith Atkinson

If we wanted to keep track of the score in a game, we stored the current score in a variable. But what if we had a game with 100 levels and we wanted to keep track of the score that the player got at each level? Unfortunately, variables can only store ONE thing at time, […]

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Images

July 12, 2016 Written by Keith Atkinson

Adding images is a great way to add to a program. But there are some things to keep in mind: Your project must be saved! Your image must be saved in the same directory as your project Your image must be saved as one of the following formats: GIF, JPG, TGA, or PNG If we […]

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Functions

July 12, 2016 Written by Keith Atkinson

Processing has several functions like ellipse(), rect(), and fill() Those functions are provided by the makers of Processing to make our life easier when drawing and coloring shapes. We can also make our own functions! Functions are great for making reusable code. If we perform the same task over and over again, we can simply […]

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For Loops

July 11, 2016 Written by Keith Atkinson

For loops do the exact same thing as while loops except they are formatted differently. Just like while loops, we use for loops to make the boring, repetitive tasks of programming a lot easier. Some programmers like for loops better than while loops because they are more readable, while other programmers like while loops better […]

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While Loops

July 10, 2016 Written by Keith Atkinson

If you wanted to draw 10 identical ellipses in a row, you could write 10 ellipse functions like so: Writing out 10 ellipse functions is not very hard, but what if you wanted to draw 200 ellipses or 1000 ellipses? It would be a lot of work to write all those ellipse functions (and even […]

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Bouncing Circle

July 10, 2016 Written by Keith Atkinson

We are going to create a program in which a ball bounces off the four walls of the screen. Each time the ball hits a wall, it changes color. When programmers write large programs, they first write a tiny chunk of the program and then check to see if it is working before they move […]

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