Tuesday, August 18, 2020

Scratch Book Review

There are tons of online resources for learning to code with Scratch, but once in a while it’s nice to use a real book. I recently purchased one of the DK workbooks, Coding in Scratch: Projects, written by Steve Setford and JonWoodcock. This isn’t a very comprehensive book (only 40 pages); but then, it isn’t very expensive either (only $5.69 on Amazon). But this little book packs a lot of information into a colorful, simple-to-understand format.

While it has the look of an introductory book, its 5 projects are fairly sophisticated and jump right into some of the more advanced concepts like sprite editing, score keeping, random number generation, and mouse control. For example, the Weird Music project teaches you how to play musical instruments (a common introductory tutorial). But it takes the project to a whole different level by showing you how to vary the loudness and notes based on the distance and direction between the sprite and the mouse-pointer. That’s a lot of embedded arithmetic operations, but the book’s colorful graphics make it look easy.

As an educator, the feature I like best about the DK workbooks are the Show What You Know activity pages at the end of each project. They’re a great way to reinforce concepts and give kids a chance to reflect on lessons learned. Overall, I highly recommend this book as a great code-at-home resource. I just might look into adding the Coding in Scratch: Games book to my collection.