[00:00:04] When you open Scratch 1.4, this is the screen you'll be met with. We're gonna go around this environment to explore the different sections. Starting at the toolbar here and the top left, you can see that you can set the language of your project, next this by clicking on the icon of the disk. You can save your project.
[00:00:28] If you are a member of the online Scratch community, by clicking this icon, you can upload your project to the Scratch website.
[00:00:41] Then by clicking file, you have a number of options, you can open a new project, open a project you've previously been working on, save your project. You can import another Scratch project. Export a sprite, and we'll look at what sprites are in just one moment, and then make any notes that you'd like to on your project in this window that opens here.
[00:01:06] Under the edit tab, you can undelete anything you've just deleted.
[00:01:12] You can then also start and set single stepping. Single stepping in Scratch 1.4 changes the speed at which the program is run at. You can also turn on flash blocks and when this is on, each command will flash as it is being executed. And this is really useful for debugging.
[00:01:32] There's also the option to turn on the motor command blocks if you're linking Scratch up to some external motors to do some control work.
[00:01:44] Then under the share tab, you can again share your project to the online Scratch community. Click to go to the Scratch website and clicking any of the options under the help tab will take you to the help content on the Scratch website.
[00:02:00] In the upper right hand portion of the screen is the stage area where we can view the project that we are creating. Our project will be made up of sprites, like the Scratch cat here, which are objects which can perform actions as well as a stage background. sprites can be added to our projects in this area beneath the stage. There are three different options to add a sprite. We can paint a new sprite, we can load a sprite from file or we can get a surprise sprite. So let me just show here how to add a sprite from file. We can click on that, go to one of the folders. Choose a sprite and load that into our project.
[00:02:40] To load a new background into our project, we need to select stage, and then once we've selected the stage, we need to select the backgrounds tab and you can see the options for adding a new background are to paint a background, to import one, or to use the camera as a way of getting a background into your project.
[00:03:03] I'm going to select the import option here. Again, there's folders of backgrounds that come with Scratch 1.4 and I'm going to choose one of these, click okay, and it's been loaded into my project. By selecting either of the sprites in the window here, we can rename them. And we can change the way they move in our projects using these buttons here.
[00:03:37] With the costumes tab selected, you can see the costumes available for each sprite, so we can see here. Here the monster just has one costume. If we select the cat, we can see that it has two costumes. Costumes are alternative appearances for a sprite, and you can paint them, import them, we'll use the camera to bring them into your project.
[00:04:00] Next to the costumes tab is the sounds tab, where we can record or import sounds, which can then be used as part of the programme for this sprite. If we now select the scripts tab, the area here is where we build the program for our sprite and we do that using the commands which are available in the Scratch programming language which are shown here, and these are categorized in the block palette here. So we have the motion commands, the looks, commands, sounds, pen, control, sensing, operators, and variables. So, to build a program for our sprite, we simply drag the commands that we wish to use in our program over into the script area, as I'm going to do here to build a very simple programme for Felix, the sprite here.
[00:05:08] To run our program, we then click the green flag icon to the top right hand corner of the stage here, and that will run any program that we've created which starts with the 'when green flag clicked' command. So I'm going to run the program now and you can see this simple programme just get Felix to chase the mouse pointer. I can stop the program by clicking the red octagon.
[00:05:34] Finally, we're going to look at these tools available to the top left of the stage area. The first is a duplicate tool which allows us to duplicate a sprite or it allows us to duplicate parts of our program that we've created for that sprite.
[00:05:50] Next to it is a cut tool which can be used to delete. Again, this can be used to delete parts of program or the whole sprite. Then there are two tools which can change the size of sprite so we can grow the sprite using this tool. You simply click on the sprite to make it grow or change to the shrink sprite tool, and click on the site to shrink it. So this has been an introduction to Scratch 1.4 where we've looked at the purpose of each of the sections in the programming environment.
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