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Free book "Computer Science Concepts in Scratch"

Contributed by Moti Ben-Ari, February 04, 2013
Middle-school students can learn computer science by working through guided projects.
  • Original Author: Michal Armoni and Moti Ben-Ari
  • Education Level: Middle School, High School, College and University
  • Content Types: Sample Scratch Project, Textbook
  • Curricular Areas: Computer Science
  • Keywords: computer science, project-based learnings

"Computer Science Concepts in Scratch" can be download from https://stwww1.weizmann.ac.il/scratch/scratch_en/ and used under a Creative Commons license. An archive with the Scratch source code for 150 programs is also available. This book will familiarize you with the Scratch visual programming environment, focusing on using Scratch to learn computer science. The book is structured as a collection of tasks. Each chapter teaches a new concept, but the concept is introduced in order to solve a specific task such as animating dancing images or building a game. Each chapter starts with a simple task, but as soon as we solve one task, we add additional tasks to extend the existing task. The sequence of tasks will require a new construct of Scratch or the use of constructs you know in new ways.

We've written and posted a supplement to our book for Scratch 2.0.

Resource Files
Links: 
Computer Science Concepts in Scratch
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Comments
Sean McManus
Member
June 06, 2013
That looks like a great resource! Thank you for sharing it. Could I ask how you screengrabbed the blocks without any background on them? Did you have to manually edit each image?
Moti Ben-Ari
Member
June 06, 2013

 Hi Sean,

Thanks for your interest in our book!

There is a document called the "The Scratch 1.4 Reference Guide" and you could also download a zip file with gifs of all the blocks. The pdf of this document still exists but not the zip file. For our supplementary document on Scratch 2.0, I used "PrtScn" and then edited the images (using IrfanView). I didn't bother to blank the background...

Moti

Moti Ben-Ari
Member
May 05, 2013

Michal and I have edited and improved the book and we now release it as Version 1.0. This release comes a few days before that of Scratch 2, so we'll have to start working on a new version :-).

 

Baron Smith
Member
May 05, 2013

Wow, I just began looking at this and it is very impressive.  It will take some time to get through it all.  Thank you so much for sharing this.  You are a big asset to the community!

Susan Newton
Member
April 17, 2013

 Thank you for sharing this--great resource!