Scratch Programming: From Beginner to Mastery

This book is a Scratch visual programming tutorial for absolute beginners, progressing through three parts: basic programming, graphical programming, and advanced programming. The basic programming part first introduces readers to the Scratch editor interface and block instruction system, then explains the use of variables, operators, lists, and custom procedures (custom blocks), and introduces flowcharts for describing algorithms and structured programming; this part strings together knowledge points with interesting math cases such as Han Xin's troop count, chickens and rabbits in the same cage, the hailstone conjecture, the Euclidean algorithm, Kaprekar's black hole, and the Josephus ring. The graphical programming part focuses on controlling sprite movement on the stage and collision detection, costume switching and effects, sound playback and instrument simulation, and pen and stamp drawing, with a comprehensive "Undersea Adventure" game running through the chapters, plus small projects such as an electronic photo album, a street dance performance, a line-following beetle, a bouncing ball, catching butterflies with gestures, and growing mushrooms. The advanced programming part explains cloning technology and the message broadcasting mechanism, how to organize multi-sprite multi-scene projects, and event-driven and object-oriented design ideas, and introduces data structures and algorithms such as bubble sort, selection sort, insertion sort, quicksort, sequential search, binary search, backtracking algorithms, two-dimensional arrays, queues, and stacks through cases such as an "English-Chinese dictionary" and "maze escape." The book emphasizes the integration of "math + games + algorithms," with step-by-step explanations and end-of-chapter exercises to help readers truly master visual programming and lay a foundation for later transition to text-based programming such as Python and C++.