Head to http://scratch.mit.edu/ and sign up for an account on MIT’s website by clicking Join Scratch atop the page. Any username (that’s available) is fine, but take care to remember it and your choice of password.
Then head to http://scratch.mit.edu/help/ and take note of the resources available to you before you dive into Scratch itself. In particular, you might want to skim the Getting Started Guide.
Next head to http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/26329354/ to see Pikachu’s Pastry Catch by Gabe Walker. Click the blue square above the game’s top-left corner if you’d like to full-screen the user interface (UI). Then click the green flag. Per Gabe’s instructions, as soon as you hit your keyboard’s space bar, the game will begin! Feel free to procrastinate a bit. And if you’d like to try out Ivy’s Hardest Game, by Carlos Peña-Lobel, head to http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/26329347/.
If you’ve no experience (or comfort) whatsoever with programming, rest assured that Gabe’s and Carlos’s projects are more complex than what we expect for this first problem set. (Click See inside in Scratch’s top-right corner to look at each project’s underlying "implementation details.") But they do reveal what you can do with Scratch.
In fact, for a gentler introduction to Scratch (and programming more generally), you might want to review some of the examples that we looked at in Week 0’s second lecture and take a look at a few more, the "source code" for which can be found athttp://scratch.mit.edu/studios/522341/. Allow me to take you on a tour, though feel free to forge ahead on your own if you’d prefer:
