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Class 1

Scratch Interface and creating sprites and backdrops
Peter Zheng

Class Topics

Student Portal Usage
Email signup
Checking your grade
Watching the recording
Submitting homework
Student manuel
Learning about the interface
Toolbox
Code
Costumes
Sounds
Workspace
Canvas
Play Button
Creating sprite/backdrop
Difference between sprites and costumes
Using the paint tool
Generating new sprites
Choose a surprise sprite
Choose a sprite from the library
Managing multiple sprites
Bear and banana

Learning Objectives

Students should understand how to navigate within the Scratch interface and know where to find important controls.
Students should have a basic understanding of what sprites are and what backdrops are.
Students should have the opportunity to create multiple sprites and apply logic to each of them.

What is a sprite?

Sprites are images that represent game assets. Player characters, enemies, projectiles, and other items are all called sprites (more on sprite types to come). Thus, sprites appear everywhere in games, including the title screen, within game levels, and even the game over screen.
A costume is one out of many different frames (pictures) of a sprite.
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You can use a paint tool in Sprite to customize your sprite and costumes:
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We can create a black cap for our cap using the paint brush and the color fill bucket.
The paint brush’s thickness can be updated by changing the number in the input on the right:
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The smaller the number, the thinner the brush.
If you want to choose a sprite that’s more polished, you can look into the sprites library and you can either get a surprise sprite by pressing
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Or choose a sprite from the library by pressing this button:
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Note that if you’re in the costumes tab screen, the button would take you to find a costume. If you’re looking for a new sprite, you have to navigate back to the “Code” screen to find the same button.
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Once you’re in the sprites library, you can use the filter buttons on top to filter for your sprite, simply clicking on the sprite would help you create the sprite on your screen.

Let’s create more than one sprite

Let’s pick 2 sprites of your choice from the library, and add some code to them:
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Here we created a bear and a banana sprite, and the cat sprite was deleted. If you use the “trash can” icon that shows up on the top left corner of your sprite’s icon on the bottom, you’ll be able to delete the sprite.
We can create code logic for bear and for banana, let’s make the bear say “Yummy” when clicking on the bear, and make the banana rotate to the right by 15 degrees when clicking on the banana!

Learning about the Scratch Interface

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This is your toolbox, you’ll see that this is separated into 3 sections:
Menu
Blocks
Tabs

Menu

Inside the vertical menu, you have colorful menu items for different categories of blocks, you can click on any of them to check what blocks you have inside of a specific menu.
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Motion - Menu that includes blocks that can control the movement of your sprite.
Looks - Menu that includes blocks that change the way sprites look.
Sounds - Menu that includes blocks that controls the sound of your game.
Events - Menu that includes blocks that create event listeners for your game, such as key strokes and mouse clicks. Tt’s one of the most important part of your game that creates interaction between the the user and the game.
Control - Menu that includes blocks that creates loops, and conditional logic for the game.
Sensing - Menu that has blocks that can create triggers in the game that happens when a specific conditon is met.
Oeprators - Menu that includes all blocks that does calculation and arithmetic operations in the game, important for math!
Variables - You can manage all of your values and their alias in here.
My Blocks - You can create custom blocks of blocks that does something and can be reused repeatedly.

Tabs

You have 3 tabs on the toolbox that gives you control of your sprite in Code, Costumes and Sounds.
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Code

This is where all the blocks and menus are, you can drag blocks of code into the center of your screen to create logic for your game.

Costumes

You can check out all the variations of your sprite here, you can also use this to create your own custom sprites and costumes.

Sounds

Where sounds happen, you can use this tab to manage the sound recordings or browse from a library of sounds to pick from.

Blocks

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Blocks are the basic building blocks of your game, there are hundreds of them and each one of them is shaped like a lego piece. You can find openings on each block and just aim them at a neighboring block you’ll be able to snap them together.


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