[00:00:04] When you either open Scratch 2 on a computer or log in to use the online version. This is the screen that you'll be met with. What we're gonna do is we're gonna go round this environment to explain the purpose of each of the areas. We're going to start up here with the options available when the left hand portion of the toolbar, the Scratch logo will take you to the online community. There's the option to set the language of the project. And then in the final tab, you can select to open a new project, open at an existing project you've created or save your project. Then if you're running Scratch on your computer as I am, there'll be the option to share your project online. Or if you're working online, you'll be able to download your project to your computer. The edit tab allows you to change the layout of Scratch, and also turn on turbo mode where Scratch processes commands quicker. You can access lots of helpful information by clicking the tips button.
[00:01:04] And clicking 'about' will take you to the Scratch website.
[00:01:10] Beneath the toolbar is the stage area where we can be the project that we are creating.
[00:01:15] Our project will be made up of sprites, like the cat here, which are objects that can perform actions as well as a stage background. These can be added to the project in the section beneath the stage here. It is possible to add a new sprite in a number of ways, either by choosing a new sprite from library, painting a sprite, uploading sprite from a file, or using camera to create a sprite. So I might choose here to add a new sprite from the library that's available, add the bat sprite here. And in a similar way, we can add new stages to our project using similar options. So again, I might choose to access one of the stages available in the library that comes with Scratch.
[00:02:04] And load that into the project.
[00:02:08] By selecting a sprite and clicking on the eye that appears, we can also access the sprite info pane, where we can rename our sprite and also set certain constraints about the way the sprite moves and rotates within our project.
[00:02:27] The central section of the interface contains the block palette. The blocks in Scratch are organized by motion, looks, sound, and data, events, control, sensing, operators, and more blocks. Each of the blocks, as we can see them here, available under each of these categories, represents a specific command which we can use to create programmes for each of the sprites in our project. This is achieved by dragging the blocks into the scripting area to the right to the block palette as shown here.
[00:03:17] To run these commands, we can click the green flag at the top of the stage area, which will activate any commands with this 'when green flag clicked' block. So we can see the programme is now running and the programme is causing the sprite to follow the mouse pointer. We can end the program by clicking the red octagon to the right of the green flag.
[00:03:39] By selecting the costumes tab above the block palette, we can access the costumes paying for the sprite, a costume is an alternative appearance for a sprite and we can load costumes with the same options we had for initially creating a sprite. We can then also edit the costumes in Scratch's paint editor, which appears when the costume tab has been selected. The tab adjacent to costumes is sounds. In this section sounds can be loaded into our project from the Scratch library, recorded, or uploaded from a file.
[00:04:13] Finally, let's look at these commands to the right hand side of the toolbar, the first is duplicate, which allows us to duplicate a sprite. It also allows us to duplicate parts of our programme within a sprite script area. Second is delete, and this would allow us to delete either parts of our programme or sprites in our project. There are then two tools for changing the size of sprites, a shrink and a grow option, so we can grow the bat here and shrink the cat down. And finally, there is a block help tool which you can select. Click on any block and information about that command will open from the side menu.
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