Code Your Own Games!: 20 Games to Create with Scratch

A perfect gift for our Grandson. He said it was one of his best gifts for Christmas. Straight away he proceeded to figure out a game and then was delighted to share his 1st game on Skype with us in New Zealand.

I bought this book for my 8-year-old. At first I thought I was going to have to go through the book with him, but honestly he picked it all up on his own and has gone back to it multiple times to build the new games. It didn't take him long to build upon what he learned in the book and he started creating his own games. I think the fact that it's game oriented really helps the kids get interested. As a father who is in the software engineering profession this has been a wonderful way to bond with my child and spawn some interest in computer science for him.

My 7 year old loves coding in scratch, and this is his favourite book about it

I use this with grandchildren, ages 5, 8 & 12 as a base to let them design their own applications. While the 5 yo is barely reading, she took immediately to the background design feature and, I would work with her, using snipers from the code projects, to animate simple games. The 8 & 12 yo are working more on their own. This is well supported by the book where projects are broken up into 5 increasing levels of difficulty. This is the most requested activity when they come over and I was able to configure old laptops to run a portable version of Scratch fro a jump drive so they all could work simultaneously and never require internet or hard drive access. The book was so good, I purchased a second one for them to work with at home. A note of caution: different versions of Scratch use slightly different icons that may require some adaption from the version the book uses as its basis. I"ve preworked exercises to minimize this issue. Other than that, all projects appear to work and provide a fun way to introduce programming at different levels.

My nephew will love this

In my professional life I've done just enough coding to know that the way you learn to write code is by copying something similar and then changing it to do what you want it to do. Tre trick is getting the right code to copy. This book is perfect for that; the projects are very simple yet fun and appealing, and new concepts are introduced gradually. We got a different scratch book from the library and it sat untouched for a few months. After we bought this book my kid made five games from it in the first week. 10/10, no notes, if you're only gonna get one scratch book, get this one.