3. A Review of the Basic Components of Scratch Projects

As you have already seen, Scratch application projects are comprised of backgrounds and sprites. Sprites interact and move about the stage under the programmatic control of scripts made up of code blocks. This chapter will explain the three basic types of code blocks and how they work together to create scripts. It will also review the eight categories into which all Scratch’s 100-plus code blocks are grouped. Although this chapter does not offer an in-depth review of each individual code block, it will provide a series of tables that you can bookmark and use as a quick reference when developing new Scratch applications.

An overview of the major topics covered in this chapter includes:

• A detailed explanation of stack blocks, hat blocks, and reporter blocks

• A demonstration of how to work with and configure monitors

• A review of all 100-plus code blocks that make up Scratch scripts

• An explanation of how to display help information for individual code blocks