This is the first in 4 lessons in basic programming that will guide beginners through the basic structures of coding. It is all about visual learning and does NOT include any lines of code. This course is great for kids to get familiar with the flow of programming without getting bored with code. As well as for adults who might not be sure if programming is for them or not.

These components allow your character, which we call "sprite", to move around in various ways. Try clicking one of the components and see how the default sprite "cat" moves around the screen.

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2. Looks

These components will be used to change the appearance of your on-screen sprites. But we will mostly use this category to make our character say different lines and interact with us through text.

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3. Sound

The name makes it obvious that we will use these components to play different sounds from our sprites. You can even record your own voice (if you have a microphone on your laptop/PC). The sprite will play it back for you when we program it later on.

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4. Events

This one gets a bit technical so bear with me. These components are used as signals at the start of a program. It signals to the program that when this event occurs, start running the program. For example, the first Event you see is "when 🚩 clicked", if it is placed at the beginning of our program, that program will start running as soon as you click the flag.

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Those are the component categories we will be using today. The more advanced ones will be explored in later lessons. For now, these are enough for us to make our first Scratch program.

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The Work Space:

Any component we select can be clicked to get the desired effect. But to make use of these components in a program, we must drag and drop them in our workspace.

Go to the Motion category and drag and drop the "move 10 steps" component to the workspace, it will permanently stay there until you drag and drop it out of the workspace. Now if you click on it, the cat will move 10 steps to the right. Similarly, we can bring more components to the workplace and we can manipulate their placement to build our program.

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Stacking Components Together:

We can combine multiple components together and they will be performed in sequence i.e. one after the other when we click on the whole stack.

Go to the Looks category and drag the "say Hello for 2 seconds" component to the workspace. Now separately, the two components on our workspace can be clicked to get their own effect. But if we stack one on top of each other, we get a stack. Drag the purple component and place it underneath the blue component. Now click on the whole stack. You will see that the cat will move 10 steps to the right and then say "Hello" for 2 seconds. Now go to the Sound category and drag the "play sound Meow until done" component to the workspace and stack it underneath our previous stack. Now when you click on the stack, the cat will move 10 steps, then say hello for 2 seconds, and then say meow. You can click on this stack multiple times and it will repeat the programmed blocks in sequence.

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Building Our First Program:

We are actually very close to finishing our first program. Already, we have programmed the cat to move 10 steps, say hello, and make a "meow" sound. But to actually make it a program, we have to attach it to an event at the beginning. So that the program knows it should start when this event is triggered, rather than having to click on each stack.

Go to the Events tab and select an event on which you want the program to run. You can select a keypress but the most simple is the "when 🚩 clicked" event. Drag it to the very top of your already made stack and voila! Our first program is complete, but wait, it is tradition for a programmer's first program to say "Hello, world!". So, in our workspace's purple Looks block that says "say Hello for 2 seconds", change "Hello" to "Hello, world!". This step is optional but my job was to let you know about the tradition. It's completely up to you to follow it or not.

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Running Your First Program:

Now that we have made our first program, we will trigger the event that we placed on top to run it. In our case, we placed the "when 🚩 clicked" event. So, we will click the green flag at the top right of our workspace.

Congratulations

You have successfully built and run your first-ever Scratch Visual Program. It was fun right? Play around with these components and discover ways you can manipulate today's commands to have more fun with programming.

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GOOD BYE

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