Scratch

Scratch Project/Competition Jan - March

For our Jan - March STEM meetings we will be working on Scratch or Minecraft projects. If you want more information on getting started on your Scratch project - then you are in the right place. I hope that all of you who chose to work on Scratch games will consider entering the Discovery Museum Scratch competition. Click HERE for more details on the competition. Below I will demonstrate how to build a simple game in Scratch.

Getting Started

First you will need to crate your free Scratch account. You may chose to do you work in their online editor or download the local editor to work on your project when not online.

This is the link to Scratch: https://scratch.mit.edu/

You will need to enable sharing to enter the competition - so use an email address that you can confirm during the setup process.

Create Characters

During the January meeting we went through a brainstorming session to think of what kind of games we would like to make and started to think about the characters and tools we would have in our game. Once you have thought about what your character looks like and what your character does in the game it is time to build. You can use pre-made characters or "sprites" as characters, paint your own, or upload one from another vector graphics editor like Inkscape. I ran into some issues using characters I created in Inkscape then importing into scratch. I'd recommend trying out their Paint editor first to see if you get the results you want before using another editor.

The videos to the right show

(TOP) How to use existing Scratch sprites

(MIDDLE) Painting a Sprite from "Scratch"

(BOTTOM) Importing a Sprite from the web or another editor (like Inkscape)