4. Art Moves

In this video, you'll get familiar with Scratch, and create your own program that tells the world about your favorite art.

Scratch is a programming language.

Programming languages allow computer scientists to give computers instructions.

You're looking at Scratch's project editor and a famous painting called the Mona Lisa.

In Scratch, characters and objects, such as this image of the Mona Lisa, are called sprites.

You will program sprites to do different things.

Today, you will program the Mona Lisa to do something surprising.

You'll see that the instruction blocks you'll use to create programs.

These blocks are arranged in color-coded categories, like Motion and Looks.

One of the best ways to learn about Computer Science is to explore and try new things.

While you're working in Scratch, if you see a block that looks interesting, click on it to see what it does.

Cool.

This block makes the sprite say Hello, for two seconds.

To select a block to use in your program, click and drag it into the scripts area.

Many blocks, such as this one, have values that you can change by clicking on the whole bubble and typing.

For example, instead of saying Hello, for two seconds, the Mona Lisa can say I love art for one second, if you change the values.

To add another instruction to your program, select a block, and drag it until it snaps into the first instruction block.

The computer will read the instructions you create to make the sprite do what you want it to do.

When the computer scientist tells the computer to read and carry out instructions, it is called Running the code.

These blocks run in the order they are stacked.

To run the stack of blocks, just click on it.

Cool.

This sprite says I love art, then moves 10 steps.

This block appears to go around other blocks, so this example, we'll try that.

Oh wow, now this sprite says I love art and moves over and over.

Now that you've seen a brief introduction on how to use Scratch, it's your turn to explore.

Your first project is to make the Mona Lisa, a famous piece of art, do something surprising.

Click on the Scratch project tab you had opened previously, and try out different blocks.

Most importantly, explore what you can do in Scratch, and have fun.

Once you have a set of blocks you like, you can add a when flag clicked block from the Events menu to the top, so that the blocks will run whenever someone clicks the flag.

This will make it easier for other people to use your program.