Scratch Tutorial for Kids: Fun Step By Step

Want to test your students’ knowledge of coding or help them learn new skills? Check out this Scratch tutorial for kids! We’ll guide you step by step in creating a cool project where your character can fly across the screen. Building with Scratch coding is much easier than you imagine!

For direct guidance from an expert, join the award-winning Beginning coding classes for kids, designed by professionals from Google, Stanford, and MIT:

More advanced students can get started Intermediate Game Creation.

Complete the Initial Tutorial For Beginners

Here’s the project we’re going to make: Make your cat fly! Let’s start. If your students haven’t created a free Scratch account yet, read this article first on how to use Scratch, as it will walk you through the entire process and give you a quick overview of the easy-to-use platform.

1. Step 1: Choose your background and character

When you create a blank Scratch project, you can choose from many different options for backgrounds and characters by clicking on the two circles in the bottom right corner. Circle with image icon to select background and circle with cat icon to select character.

To create the settings, we selected “Blue Sky 2” as the background that our cat will fly across and “Flying Cat” from the character menu. Use your imagination, and choose whatever combination you are interested in!

Step 2: Create a welcome message and move the cat with the arrow keys

When we start the game, we want the cat to display a welcome message. We can use the “when the green flag is clicked” block, which indicates the start of the game. This block can be found at Control part. Then we can use the “say” block from Seen the part to create our block shows “say ‘I fly’ for 2 seconds”. Both the message and the length of time can be adjusted to our wishes.

We also want our cat to move left, right, up and down if the corresponding arrow buttons are clicked. From Programwe can get the “when button pressed” block. We need one of these blocks and change the drop down option to “left arrow”. Down here, we want it Movement “move x” block. We need to change the number in this block to -10 to indicate movement to the left.

We need an “on keypress” block and this time the dropdown option is “right arrow”. We can use Movement block “move x by 10” as is.

To handle vertical movement, we need an “on button pressed” block with an “up arrow” drop down option. Since this is vertical, we need “change y by 10” Movement block.

The final movement direction we need is down, which can be done with the “on button pressed” block with the “down arrow” option. Here we need a “change y” block and change the number to -10.

Step 3: Select objects to collect and make them move

To select another character that represents our object, we can return to the circle at the bottom right where we selected the flying cat. This time let’s choose a balloon!

Now let’s click on the balloon so we can write code for it. We want to make the balloons move randomly so the cats can have fun chasing them!

For the balloon, we want to use the “when the green flag is clicked” block because the balloon also requires its own action once the game starts. Now we can go to Control and get a “forever” block because we want our object to keep moving throughout the game. Whatever block we put in “forever” will run endlessly until we manually end the program with the “stop” button.

The first block we want is from Movementand we want to “go to random position”. The randomness keeps this project interesting. Then we want something else Movement block, “change x”. In this case, enter the number as 250. Any block that has a place for a number can be changed to any number by typing.

Next we want to go to Control and get the “repeat” block and enter the number 32. This number can be whatever you want. Inside the “repeat” block, we want the Move block “change x” and enter the number -15.

The code we have written for our balloon makes it move all over the place and we have to control the cat to catch it! Test your current program.

Hope you have fun making that project! In the next part of the tutorial, we’ll show you how to turn this flying cat project into a game where the cat gets points every time it touches a balloon.

Step 4: Add scores for your cats

Click your cat in the bottom character panel to make sure you add the code to the right section.

Then go to the oranges Variable block and click “Create variable” at the top. Type “Score” into the popup box that appears to name your variable. Once you complete this step, you will see a small Score label at the top left of your scene.

Step 5: Record the score for the cat

We want our score to reset every time we restart the program, and we want to increase the score by 1 every time the cat touches the balloon.

In the code for our cat, we want another “When the green flag is clicked” Incident block. The first block we want here comes from ours Variable part. Get the block that starts with “set” and change the dropdown option to “Score” so that our block says “set Score to 0”.

Then we want to block “forever” from Control part. We use this block because we always want to detect if the cat touched the balloon, and if so, we need to update our score.

Inside this block, we need to start with an if/then block Control so we can check whether the cat and the balloon are touching each other. You may have noticed that after the “if” in this block, there is an empty hexagon. There, we want our condition to be a “touching balloon”. We can find this hexagon-shaped condition as the first light blue block Feel part. Once we change the drop-down menu option to “Balloon”, we can drag this block into the space after the “if”.

Now we need to put something into the if/then block we added. This is where we add a point to the score! We can go back to Variable section and get the block starting with “change”. We need to change the dropdown option to “Score” and put a block under the if. Since the code moves so fast, the last thing we need in if/then is from Control. We want the “1 second wait block” to be at the top and put it at the end of the if/then.

Now your students know how to make a cool flying cat project and turn it into a game. This free Scratch tutorial introduces important coding concepts such as controls, movement, and variables. Explore additional Scratch challenges for beginners here.

Challenge Your Students With More of the Best Scratch Tutorials

Want to continue challenging your students? Here are some additional Scratch tutorials your child might enjoy. There is much more to be found on this page.

1. Animate a name

Choose the letters of your name and make them do cool things like change color and make sounds! Try it here.

2. Make music

Choose different instruments and create music by playing different sounds! Here’s how to make music in Scratch. Try it here.

3. Animate the characters

Choose a character and animate it through jumping, color changes, talking and more! Here’s how to make a jumping game in Scratch. Try it here.

4. Make the ball bounce in Scratch

Find out how to make a quick, painless, (and possibly addictive), Ball Bounce game in Scratch.

5. Make the game rolling

This rolling game revolves around a car, which will be controlled by the player; and the complicated paths that cars must follow to keep going.

6. Make a Scratch PacMan tutorial

Learn how to make a Pacman game in Scratch. When you create this game, you will design the characters and the maze.

7. Make a clean blow

Whack-A-Mole has been played for decades at carnivals, amusement parks, and arcades. You can even play Whack-A-Mole online for free. So today is your chance to learn how to make this popular game.

8. Tic Tac Toe Scratching Tutorial

In Tic Tac Toe, each player makes one type of mark, either:

9. Make a game with a tutorial level

See how to make a game with levels in Scratch. Together we will create a fun Balloon-Pop challenge.

10. Make a clicking game

Basically, to play this game, users click on large cookies to earn points per click. Here’s how to make it.

11. Initial pong tutorial

Complete the fun Scratch pong game tutorial. We’ll also share some ideas for creatively modifying your pong game.

12. Flappy bird scratching tutorial

Find out how to control birds with the space bar, build moving pillars, and update the score every time a bird flies past.

Enjoy More Scratch Tutorials For Kids

Once you’ve learned the basics, it’s time to dive into more interesting Scratch tutorials! Explore fun Scratch project ideas created by our students, each accompanied by a high-level outline and guide created with the help of AI. Have a cool project idea but not sure how to make it? Our Scratch Projects Generator, powered by advanced AI, is here to help! It can flesh out your ideas, provide step-by-step guidance, offer sample code, and even create custom images to enhance your project. Give it a try and unlock endless fun and creativity!

Join the award-winning virtual for free Initial coding class:

Written by Sophie Andrews, Create & Learn instructor. Sophie Andrews is a student at Stanford University studying Mathematics and
Computational Science. He loves teaching and is a teaching assistant for an introductory computer science class at Stanford. His work focuses on data science. Last year he created the online National Vote Trackers for The Cook Political Report, and he currently leads the Data Team at The Stanford Daily. He also interned at the FCC and the National Renewable Energy Lab.