Hi all and welcome back to what we hope will be an exciting year in Coder Dojo Athenry.

We will be using Scratch 2 this year. So the first thing that we need to do is install it.

There are two Applications that you need to install:

1. AdobeAir

2. Scratch2

I will have all the Versions that I can find on USB, which should cover both Windows and Mac. I have installed the Windows version, so I know that one works. I won’t have tested the Mac version though.

Scratch2 introduces the idea of making your own Blocks of code that you can then use in your programs. So for the first week we are going to try these out and see how they can help us write Code once but use it many times.

And for that we need a project to work on – A Calculator.

• We will learn about Functions (Code Blocks in Scratch2)
• We will learn about passing information into Functions

We are going to design and build a fully functioning Calculator that can Add, Subtract, Multiply and Divide. If you get really adventurous you can add some other functions as well – percentages maybe?

Like you I haven’t written it yet, so it going to be a bit scary tomorrow as we have to make it all up as we go along, but hey, you’re the advanced crowd, and should be able to handle that!

Once we have a fully working version I will update this blog with the full details of how and why we did what we did.

If we can get anything like the following picture, I think we are definitely Advanced…

Everything that you see on this calculator is perfectly possible in Scratch2, we will start with the four basic options of Addition, Subtraction, Multiplication and Division.