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.

My 8 year old son has been doing a lot of Scratch as he wants to be a game developer one day. Whilst I'm a programmer, Scratch is also new to me so I don't know all the capabilities of this simplified code blocks and can't always answer questions like "Can I make the ball bounce?", "Can I pull back and fling the ball?". This book has given him direction and inspiration for making simple games without overcomplicating things the way he was before; it's great at the "KISS" technique! The first few example games use methods that he's familiar with but with a specific goal in mind and we added extra functions to reset the sprite when you press "r", making it easier to play things like races again. I'm looking forward to creating some of the more difficult games with him. He likes the book for ideas, but doesn't tend to work through step by step unless supervised, even then he's got a tendency to go off on his own journey and make something uniquely his. I'm really pleased with it and so is he. I think 8 year olds will need some support with the book but older (or more rule abiding!) children will be fine. It's simple enough for adults without any programming knowledge to give support.

Scratch is a nice way to learn coding concepts. And my son is enjoying making the games. The lessons are easy enough to plug in the code, while the challenges at end end of each chapter give kids the opportunity to do it on their own. I'm giving it a 5 rating but there are some errors in the book. The ones I've found so far: P. 27 - Moving the player up/down on y-coordinate should use the "change y by..." block. P. 30 - The "repeat until..." block should be "color <dark red bumper> is touching <green background>", remove the "not" block. I'll update as I find more errors.

This is a great book with a good selection of projects that are easy to follow for kids starting with Scratch. Good design, easy to follow, plenty of screenshots and detailed explanations of each block and why it is used the way it is used.

my 7 year old son loves this book, so many fun ideas for him to try!

Ask (almost) any kid why they want to learn to program and they will say they want to write games. This book makes good use of that fact to keep kids interested while teaching them how to program in Scratch. Working though this book with my 8 year old. We are both enjoying building on the examples to make the games do more. Superb book!