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San Francisco, CA (October 24, 2016) — Learning how to program doesn’t have to be dry and dreary! With the latest release from No Starch Press, young readers will make a game of it. A leader in STEM education, No Starch Press has a long-standing tradition of publishing engaging, “no-fluff” coding books for kids like Teach Your Kids to Code, Learn to Program with Scratch, and Python for Kids. Scratch Programming Playground ($24.95, 288 pp., Sept. 2016) continues this tradition and is a project-packed guide to making fun games using the world’s most popular programming language for beginners.
Scratch is a colorful drag-and-drop programming language (designed by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab) in which users connect blocks of code to create interactive stories, games, and animations. Coding with Scratch is intuitive, versatile, and perfectly suited for visual learners, making it an excellent first step for aspiring programmers.
In Scratch Programming Playground, readers follow step-by-step directions to make familiar games like Fruit Slicer, Asteroids, Snake, and even a game inspired by Super Mario Bros. By combining colorful blocks of code, kids will quickly learn computer programming concepts, like loops, strings, and variables, without having to master the cryptic syntaxes found in most programming languages. Every chapter includes review questions to reinforce the discussed concepts and extra coding challenges to level up each game and extend the lesson even further.
According to No Starch Press founder Bill Pollock, “Kids learn best through play. Budding computer scientists love playing games— this book is a way to ease curious kids into the field of computer science by showing them how to program games they want to play.”
Scratch Programming Playground is an exciting introduction to coding that’s perfect for kids who love playing games and the parent or teacher looking to translate that passion to coding.
Scratch Programming Playground is available in bookstores everywhere.
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Sample pages from Scratch Programming Playground:
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About the Author
Al Sweigart is a software developer who teaches programming to kids and adults. He has written several programming books for beginners, including Automate the Boring Stuff with Python and the upcoming Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python, also from No Starch Press.
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Available in fine bookstores everywhere, from http://www.oreilly.com/nostarch, or directly from No Starch Press: http://www.nostarch.com, [email protected], 1-800-420-7240.
About No Starch Press
From deep in the heart of San Francisco’s start-up gulch, No Starch Press publishes the finest in geek entertainment, covering topics like LEGO, programming (for young and old), science, and math. Our titles have personality, our authors are passionate, and our books tackle topics that people care about.
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