25 Scratch Games for Kids

We did a full review of this book on my blog at coderkids.com, independent of the author/publisher. We highly recommend it! A few key points of things we liked: 1) The games are short and sweet, so kids can complete a full mini-game in 15 minutes. A lot of other books only have like 6 projects compared to 25, so the time dedication to each project is a substantial benefit to busy parents. Perfect for a total beginner. 2) Strong illustrations and clear directions make it clear for the child to know where to get the next steps from. 3) Games progress in difficulty throughout the book at a nice pace. The first projects are 2 pages - by the end they are 6 pages. The quick wins early in the book will hopefully compel your child to keep pushing forward. 4) Games are focused on a specific game mechanic that is easy to identify. Movement, Score tracking, adding variables, adding / drawing new sprites - once the kids know the concepts behind the games, they are more likely to be able to create their own games. 5) The mini-games are great for sparking creativity. Since there are 25 shorter games in the book, there's an expectation and challenge for the kids to take what they've learned and run with it. Longer, more intensive projects tend to be more of a copying ordeal that require a lot of parental help. Most kids ages 8+ will find this book enabling of their independent creativity as budding coders.

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.

Provides good tricks and easy to understand instruction on scratch 3.0

After looking through a lot scratch programming books and trying out a couple, I settled on this one and have been working through it with an 8 and a 10 year old. I have them do a few exercises a week, and then encourage them to experiment with the ideas they just learned to create new games in between. They mostly work through it on their own, with an occasional assist from me (mostly for typos). I really like the format of using a short and simple game to teach a new concept, which seems well matched for their attention span. Note: The eBook I purchased seems to have all the errata updates and we've only ran across one minor bug (which my 10 year old found and fixed), but if you buy the print version and you don't have programming experience, you will definitely want to keep an eye on the errata page.

The bugs in the code is inexcusable. There is no way that a parent without a background in programming could have figured out why the code wasn't working. The frustration this causes could turn a child away from programming forever. Also, they did not explain the process of putting the game together. It quickly becomes just copying code and not understanding what the code does.