Where to Go From Here

Ready for more? There are plenty of Scratch resources to keep things exciting.

• Scratch Programming Playground Studio (http://www.inventwithscratch.com/studio/) is a place to share your own games based on the ones in the book! You can check out other readers’ projects while you’re there.
• The Scratch Forums (http://scratch.mit.edu/discuss/) is a place for Scratchers to share ideas and ask and answer questions.
• 25 Scratch 3 Games for Kids by Max Wainewright (No Starch Press, 2019; https://www.nostarch.com/25scratchgames/) is a book with more projects to build in Scratch.
• ScratchEd (http://scratched.gse.harvard.edu/) is an online community created for teachers and other educators who use Scratch. Share your success stories, exchange Scratch resources, ask questions, and more.

There are many fun games and animations you can make with Scratch, but it does have some limitations. Your Scratch programs might not look like the “real” games you play on a PC, game console, or smartphone.

So, it’s only natural that you might want to learn how to write code in a professional programming language. There are many languages to choose from, but I recommend Python or JavaScript. Python is the easiest language to learn (aside from Scratch), but it is still a language used by professional software developers. JavaScript is not quite as easy, but it’s the language used for web apps that run in your browser.

If you want to learn Python, I recommend a book I wrote: Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python. This book is free to read online at https://inventwithpython.com/, or you can buy it at https://www.nostarch.com/inventwithpython/. If you want to learn JavaScript, I recommend Nick Morgan’s JavaScript for Kids (No Starch Press, 2014; https://www.nostarch.com/javascriptforkids/). These books are great for the next step of your journey to become a master programmer.