Scratch game development
Ten weeks of building playable games. Your child finishes with a platformer with levels, a score and a start screen.
- Grades
- 5–7
- Ages
- 10–12
- Length
- 10weeks
- Sessions a week
- 2
- Each session
- 75min
- Class size
- 12max
What this course is
This is the course most Junior Tech Cadets start with, and it is deliberately not an introduction to Scratch. It is a course in programming that happens to use Scratch, because at this age the ideas are the hard part and the typing is only friction.
Students build four complete games over the term, each one introducing something the previous one could not do: a maze that needs collision detection, a catcher that needs variables, a shooter that needs cloning, and finally a platformer that needs gravity, levels and state. By the last of these the student is designing the rules themselves and asking the instructor for help implementing them, which is the whole point.
We spend real time on debugging. Every student will at some point have a sprite that will not stop spinning, and learning to find out why — rather than deleting it and starting again — is the most transferable thing in the course.
Week by week
Every week ends with something that did not exist at the start of it. That is what is listed under “ends with”.
- Week 01
Sprites, motion and the stage
Coordinates, direction, and the event blocks that start a script. Students learn that the stage is a grid and that a sprite has a position on it.
Ends with: A sprite the student can drive around the stage with the arrow keys.
- Week 02
Loops
Forever, repeat, and repeat-until. Why a computer will happily do something ten thousand times, and what happens when you forget to let it stop.
Ends with: An animated scene with three sprites moving on independent loops.
- Week 03
Conditions and collisions
If, if-else, and touching detection. Students write their first game rule: what should happen when this touches that.
Ends with: A finished maze game where hitting a wall sends the player back to the start.
- Week 04
Variables and keeping score
Making a variable, changing it, and reading it. The classic bug where the score jumps by seven, and how to find out why.
Ends with: A catcher game with a live score, a countdown timer and a lives counter.
- Week 05
Broadcasts and game states
Messages between sprites, and using them to move a game between a start screen, play, and game over.
Ends with: The catcher game rebuilt with a title screen and a proper ending.
- Week 06
Clones
Making many of a thing from one thing. Clone lifecycles, and why a clone that never deletes itself will eventually freeze the project.
Ends with: A shooter with waves of enemies spawned as clones.
- Week 07
Designing before building
Students plan their final project on paper: what the player does, what the rules are, what makes it hard. The instructor reviews the plan before any blocks are dragged.
Ends with: A one-page written game design signed off by the instructor.
- Week 08
Gravity and platforms
Simulating falling with a y-velocity variable, jumping, and standing on a platform without sinking through it.
Ends with: A character that walks, jumps and lands on solid ground.
- Week 09
Levels, polish and sound
Moving between levels, adding sound effects, costume animation, and the small touches that make a game feel finished rather than abandoned.
Ends with: A three-level platformer with sound and a win screen.
- Week 10
Playtesting and showcase
Students swap projects, write down every bug and confusion they hit, fix the reports they receive, and then present their game to the group.
Ends with: A tested, shareable project link and a short presentation of it.
What they will be able to do
- Reason about loops, conditions, variables and events without help
- Break a game idea into rules that a computer can follow
- Find and fix a bug rather than restarting the project
- Explain how their own program works to somebody else
What they build
- A maze game with collision detection
- A catcher game with score, lives and a timer
- A wave-based shooter using clones
- A three-level platformer with gravity, sound and a win screen