Scratch 2.0 Game Development HOTSHOT

This is an advanced Scratch programming book that my 9 year old son and one of his classmates happened to receive independently for Christmas. Needless to say, they have had many hours of challenging learning enjoyment from it. Both of these Scratch enthusiasts are highly self-directed, but the book is conducive to that type of learning, and has required no adult support to complete any of the projects. It is clearly written, has excellent game examples, and provides advanced programming techniques that help one more fully realize how amazing Scratch is as a creative and educational IDE.

This book is very well written, very educational and most importantly easy to understand and follow.My kids grab the book after I had a chance to read it and started making games. The book has clear, step by step instructions for building different projects.It is one of the most engaging, educational and fun books I have read in years. Highly recommended. A+++

Great book to learn intermediate and advanced Scratch coding.

We loved this book. My 10 year old and I wrote games that we never imagined we could write. I am not a programmer and can not comment on "technique" but we had tons of fun and learned a whole lot about programming. This is a great introduction to programming.

Very good

As someone who uses both Scratch 2.0 and game design in elementary and middle-school classrooms, I'm always curious to see how other people approach the topic.Scratch 2.0 is a great platform for teaching advanced programming concepts without spending a lot of time worrying about placement of semicolons and curly braces.My hope is that I'm teaching good programming practices long before kids are focused on actual programming.So how does Scratch 2.0 Game Development Hotshot hold up?Sadly, it doesn't.The book is project based, which I love. It covers a variety of gameplay genres, which I love. It introduces a lot of the powerful features of Scratch, which is terrific. But along the way it flat out lies about features and introduces some terrible programming practices along the way.For example: In the very first project - replicating the gameplay of Angry Birds - the authors state that there is no way in Scratch 2.0 to determine the value of a built-in variable (which is false). They go on to solve that (non) problem by creating a custom variable called direction for a sprite and storing the value of the build-in direction variable. Of course, because they want to use the value of the custom direction variable in another sprite, they make the variable available to all sprites.Besides being confusing, what's the problem with this? Making a custom variable available to all sprites is the equivalent of declaring a global variable. That means it ought to be reserved for game-wide values such as playerScore or playerHealth or enemyCount, not the direction of a single object in your game. It works in the example because there are a limited number of sprites in the game, but as soon as your reader goes on to make something more complex (and they will), you've just set them up for failure.I submitted an errata for this error, pointing out that in the sensing category of Scratch 2.0 there is a block called <x> of <sprite> that simply and easily allows the developer to call any variable (built-in or custom) from any sprite in the game. The publisher responded saying that the authors had decided to ignore the Sensing category of blocks in this book because it was complicated and worthy of an entire book of its own.I have a one of two issues with that response.A) Don't lie to your reader and say something doesn't exist just because you don't want to talk about it.orB) Don't lie to cover your mistake when you've extensively used other blocks from the Sensing category in the very first project of your book.I must admit that I mostly skimmed through the rest of the book, but in each project I found information that was inaccurate, misleading, or simply making a process more difficult than it need to be.So, Buy or Don't Buy?If you're already an educator using Scratch 2.0 in the classroom, I can see picking up this book during one of Packt Pub's frequent sales for your own use. It might inspire you to expand upon your current approach, or give you more ideas of fun game-based projects to teach.If you're a parent looking to buy your kids a book to get them up to speed in Scratch - DON'T DO IT!

Scratch is a great way to introduce children to computer programming, and the Scratch 2.0 Game Development Hotshot is a great starting point for doing so. It is a nice and lengthy text with exhaustive examples of everything that a learner would need to figure out how to do almost anything they need to do when working with Scratch.This book is written well in a process that goes from simple to complex; anyone using it still needs a basic amount of familiarity with computers and at times the book suggests using external programs in addition to Scratch. Fortunately, the book lists free, easy-to-use programs in addition to the commercial software it suggests, so it remains accessible to educators and parents on a tight budget who don't already have access to programs like Photoshop.There is a small conflict in this guidebook between the complexity of programming and the need to be clearly communicative, and I feel that it did a very good job of being clear. I am not particularly proficient with Scratch, though I have worked with other alternatives extensively, but it seemed to use a very wide range of tools within the Scratch platform to accomplish its objectives, which should help learners utilize emergent strategies on their own.The inclusion of many well-chosen code excerpts and diagrams within the book is done perfectly, and there is little left to be desired by the helpful images. For more advanced users, some of these will be redundant, but given Scratch's nature as an incredibly accessible tool this could help computer novices or young children and they do not become particularly burdensome for a reader.The projects contained in the book represent a variety of game genres, and are presented in an order of increasing complexity. Most of the lessons are intended to teach specific lessons, and the included code samples make it easy to jump between the concepts being learned, allowing students who already have a background in Scratch to study only the things that they need to learn.I don't have simple praise for the book, however. There are some pressing issues, such as cases where functionality isn't really closely acknowledged or is only examined once; students need a certain degree of repetition and, like most guide books, only one way is examined to do most of the things in the example projects. While this isn't necessarily something that is horrible, it does mean that you will need to make sure that someone trained using the book has it available for at least a while after finishing all the courses, so that they can go back and get a refresher on the things they may have missed throughout.As a future educator, and a self-taught programmer, I feel that this book is a great starting point to the world of programming and game design, and I would recommend it without any reservations.Disclaimer: I got a digital reviewer copy of this book from Packt. I was not and will not be financially compensated for writing this review, nor was I pressured to write a positive review.