🐧 24 Days of Scratch Coding - Advent Calendar Book

 

Disclosure: I'm one of the authors of this book along with my fab colleagues Liz and Rebecca at Flip Computing. We had a lot of fun writing this and hope that families will enjoy coding their way through winter to Christmas and other seasonal celebrations. 

What is 24 Days of Scratch Coding?

24 Days of Scratch Coding is a kids coding book with 24 creative activities that combine coding and digital art. It's an alternative to chocolate advent calendars, or a companion if you want to combine coding and chocolate!

The book uses the popular Scratch environment. It's free and you can use it from the Scratch website or run it on your computer. Scratch works on desktop computers and tablets. Many kids will use Scratch at school and be familiar with it. 24 Days of Scratch Coding will encourage them to try new code blocks and develop their digital art skills. This isn't a formal coding tutorial book. 

Each day has an activity that builds up to an interactive winter scene full of penguins. Some days focus on coding, others on using the vector paint tool in scratch to create graphics for the projects. You also add sound effects and make use of the microphone to detect sound. 

There are also some bonus activities that put Scratch-related twists on classics such as a word search and spot the difference. 

Completed projects are available for download. This is supposed to be fun! Children will be at different levels with their Scratch experience and motor skills. We know that time can be an issue on some days and sometimes kids just get tired. We give you permission to go to the completed project on those days and just have fun with the result. 

There are also helpful tutorial videos available online for getting started with Scratch and for some of the new skills you might need to learn.

Who is 24 Days of Scratch Coding for?

The main audience for the book is children aged 8-12. Younger children will love the result of the projects but are likely to need support from an adult or older sibling. And there's really no upper age limit. We'd recommend the book for parents who think they might be interested in learning more about coding in an accessible way. 

Why did we write the book?

My house is completely taken over by the popular Advent of Code challenge in December. Advent of Code is a set of winter-themed challenges for adult coders with a leader board. The challenges increase in difficulty until they completely take over your life. My partner completes it in several programming languages. My 17 year old has also participated for the last few years. 

I have a complex relationship with Advent of Code, I've given up saying I won't do it because I always get sucked in and decide to do something daft (one year I got a very long way in Scratch!). With 24 Days of Scratch Coding we wanted to provide families with the fun and modern tradition of coding as a countdown to the festive season with more creativity and less competitiveness for a younger and more diverse audience. 

Once we'd come up with the idea, the three of us went away and started working on different parts of it. It was clear that the idea wasn't going to let us go! So we worked to put the book together for this Christmas season. 

Tips for Tablet Users

Scratch runs on touchscreen tablets but can be a little more tricky to use for creating digital art. For vector editing tasks, a computer with a mouse can be very helpful. You can connect a remote keyboard and mouse to a tablet or use a digital pen for more accuracy. Your results don't have to look exactly like ours. It's also fine to just grab the completed graphics from the solution projects and use them. 

The projects don't use 'on key pressed' so you won't need a keyboard to interact with the projects. 

Summary

24 Days of Scratch coding is a physical book that you can use as an advent calendar. There are pages that look like doors so you get the excitement of revealing each day's activity. 

We hope you'll enjoy sharing the 24 Days of Scratch Coding advent calendar book with your family during the lead up to the festive season. We really don't mind if you do multiple days at once or skip the days when you don't have time. Just have fun with it and enjoy the cute penguins.