No Starch Press 25 Scratch Games For Kids

Got this for my daughter for Christmas. She has been loving the activities. I used to teach programming for high schoolers. This is a great book that introduces many programming concepts. Scratch and MIT has done some incredible work in building their site. She's having fun while learning. Well done.

Scratch is a nice way to learn coding concepts. And my son is enjoying making the games. The lessons are easy enough to plug in the code, while the challenges at end end of each chapter give kids the opportunity to do it on their own.I'm giving it a 5 rating but there are some errors in the book. The ones I've found so far:P. 27 - Moving the player up/down on y-coordinate should use the "change y by..." block.P. 30 - The "repeat until..." block should be "color <dark red bumper> is touching <green background>", remove the "not" block.I'll update as I find more errors.

This is a great book with a good selection of projects that are easy to follow for kids starting with Scratch. Good design, easy to follow, plenty of screenshots and detailed explanations of each block and why it is used the way it is used.

My 8 year old son has been doing a lot of Scratch as he wants to be a game developer one day. Whilst I'm a programmer, Scratch is also new to me so I don't know all the capabilities of this simplified code blocks and can't always answer questions like "Can I make the ball bounce?", "Can I pull back and fling the ball?".This book has given him direction and inspiration for making simple games without overcomplicating things the way he was before; it's great at the "KISS" technique! The first few example games use methods that he's familiar with but with a specific goal in mind and we added extra functions to reset the sprite when you press "r", making it easier to play things like races again. I'm looking forward to creating some of the more difficult games with him.He likes the book for ideas, but doesn't tend to work through step by step unless supervised, even then he's got a tendency to go off on his own journey and make something uniquely his.I'm really pleased with it and so is he.I think 8 year olds will need some support with the book but older (or more rule abiding!) children will be fine.It's simple enough for adults without any programming knowledge to give support.

Excellent for teaching kids coding - a good buy.