A Quick Guide to Scratch on the Raspberry Pi

Would you like to delve into the world of animation and game creation? Do you want to bring your imaginative ideas to life without learning a software development language?

With Scratch, from MIT's innovative Media Lab (media.mit.edu), you can construct all kinds of multimedia projects without writing a single line of code. Find out more in Micro Mart issue 1236 - out today.

Here are a few extracts:

The fully visual interface is aimed at anyone old enough to use a keyboard and mouse. In fact, you hardly need to use the keyboard at all.

Scratch does away with the traditional editor and symbolic language approach. In its place there's a collection of graphical, snap-together programming blocks. Blocks with different shapes that lock together in specific ways. Blocks that perform distinct operations. Blocks with entry fields and drop down lists for specific data values.

The easiest way to dive into Scratch is to start with a ready-made program. This way we'll have something that works immediately. So we'll do just that, then spend a little time discovering how this particular example is put together, before making some changes of our own.

As we've seen Scratch makes it easy to create multimedia software, and have plenty of fun at the same time. For more inspiration visit MIT Media Lab's large and dynamic educational community at scratched.media.mit.edu. A community who frequently updates this website with new projects and helpful videos.

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