More on teaching scratch to beginners, I usually start off with building this game in Scratch.

It shows off all the important capabilities of the platform in a digestable form. The cast moves around the screen and tries to "catch" the player's mouse pointer (because puns), scores a point for each time it does, and the game ends when you reach a particular score.

The game, as it is built up in stages, demonstrates:

• Moving across the screen in terms of x and y
• Moving by different amounts
• Using a variable to represent the amount of movement
• Forever loops
• What to do at the edge of the screen
• Turning the sprite around
• Animating movement using costumes
• Moving towards another location without maths
• Touching logic and branching
• Global variables for score and win
• Stopping the game

Game