First, make sure that you have opened up the Scratch editor. You can find the online Scratch editor at jumpto.cc/scratch-new. It should look something like this:

Before you can start animating, you’ll need to add in a ‘thing’ to animate. In Scratch, these ‘things’ are called ‘sprites’. The cat that you can see is a sprite called Felix, who is the Scratch mascot. Let’s get rid of him for now, by right-clicking on him, and clicking ‘delete’.

Next, click ‘Choose sprite from library’ to open up a list of all the available Scratch sprites.

Scroll down until you see a spaceship sprite. Click on the spaceship, and click ‘OK’ to add it to your animation.

Click on your new spaceship sprite, and click the ‘Costumes’ tab.

Use the arrow tool to select the image. Then click on the circular rotate handle, and rotate the image until it is on its side.

You should now have a big spaceship on your ‘stage’. The ‘stage’ is the area on the left, and is where your animation will happen. Think of it as a performance area, just like a real stage! You can drag the spaceship around the stage to move it.

At the moment, the stage is white, and looks pretty boring! Let’s add a backdrop to the stage, by clicking on the ‘Stage’ icon, and then clicking ‘Choose backdrop from library’.

Click ‘Space’ on the left, and then click the ‘Stars’ backdrop and click ‘OK’ to add it to the stage.

Your stage should now look like this:

Another way of animating the spaceship is to tell it to move a small amount (say 4 steps), lots of times. Delete the glide block from your code, by right-clicking on the block and clicking ‘delete’. You can also delete code by dragging it off the script area, back into the code blocks area.

Once you’ve removed your code, add this code instead:

    when FLAG clicked
    point in direction (0 v)
    go to x:(-150) y:(-150)
    wait (1) secs
    point towards [Earth v]
    repeat (100)
        move (4) steps
    end

The repeat block is used to repeat something lots of times, and is also known as a ‘loop’. If you click the flag to try out this new code, you’ll see that it does pretty much the same thing as before.

Using a loop to move the spaceship means that you can add more code inside the repeat (100) loop to do interesting things. Add the change color effect by 25 block into the loop (from the ‘Looks’ section), to repeatedly change the colour of the spaceship as it moves:

    when FLAG clicked
    point in direction (0 v)
    go to x:(-150) y:(-150)
    wait (1) secs
    point towards [Earth v]
    repeat (100)
        move (4) steps
        change [color v] effect by (25)
    end

Click the flag to see your new animation.

You can also improve your animation, by making the spaceship get smaller as it moves towards the Earth. Remember to also add code to the top of your animation, to make your spaceship full size to start with.

    when FLAG clicked
    set size to (100)%
    point in direction (0 v)
    go to x:(-150) y:(-150)
    wait (1) secs
    point towards [Earth v]
    repeat (100)
        move (4) steps
        change [color v] effect by (25)
        change size by (-1)
    end

If you try out your animation now, you’ll see that it looks much better than before!

Let’s add monkey to your animation, who’s lost in space! Start by adding in the monkey sprite from the library.

If you click on your new monkey sprite and then click ‘Costumes’, you can edit how the monkey looks. Click the ‘Ellipse’ tool, and draw a white space helmet around the monkey’s head.

Now click ‘Scripts’, and add this code to the monkey, so that it spins slowly in a circle forever:

    when FLAG clicked
    forever
        turn right (1) degrees
    end

The forever block is another loop, but this time one that never ends. You’ll have to click the stop button (next to the flag) to end this animation.

You can also combine loops. Add a ‘star’ sprite to your animation, and add this code to it:

    when FLAG clicked
    forever
      repeat(20)
        change size by (2)
      end
      repeat(20)
        change size by (-2)
      end
    end

Click the flag to test out this star animation. What does this code do? Well, the star is made slightly bigger 20 times, and then made slightly smaller 20 times, back to it’s original size. These 2 loops are inside a forever loop, so the animation keeps repeating.