Official Scratch Jr. Book

Marina Umaschi Bers is a professor in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Child Study and Human Development and adjunct professor in the Computer Science Department at Tufts University. She heads the Developmental Technologies Research group where she studies innovative ways to promote positive childhood development through new learning technologies. She is also the creator of KIBO, a robotics platform for children 4 to 7, which allows young builders to learn programming and engineering without screens by integrating arts and crafts.Mitchel Resnick is the creator of Scratch, the wildly popular programming language used in thousands of schools and homes worldwide, with nearly 4 million users. He directs the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab and was awarded the McGraw Prize in Education in 2011 for his creative learning technologies.

• PrefaceAn Introduction to ScratchJrChapter 1: Getting StartedChapter 2: AnimationsChapter 3: StoriesChapter 4: GamesAfterwordAppendix A: Transitioning from ScratchJr to ScratchAppendix B: Reference GuidesIndex

“One thing that I especially liked was the curriculum connections listed out at the end of each chapter. If you happen to be a kindergarten teacher, and have access to tablets, I highly recommend checking this book out.”—Gail Carmichael, Carleton University faculty and Board Advisor for the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology“The Official ScratchJr Book is a great place to start. I highly recommend this book to all early childhood educators getting started with coding in their classrooms.”—EdSurge“A book for the youngest programmers with lots of step-by-step directions and illustrations for getting the most out of the junior version of Scratch."—Scholastic's Tech Tools“Is it ever too early to begin programming a computer? By the end of The Official ScratchJr Book, kids will be ready for all sorts of new programming adventures!”—Patheos“The Official ScratchJr Book is a great way to dive into ScratchJr. It’s fun, it’s challenging, and you can do it too.”—Game Vortex“This is a well-done guidebook to help parents, siblings, teachers, friends and other family members get up to speed quickly with ScratchJr.”—Phil Shapiro, Scratch Day volunteer“The Official ScratchJr Book focuses on inspiring creativity and still can be used to learn the nuts and bolts of simple coding and logical thinking.”—STEM Friday