One of the best ways to learn Scratch is simply to build something fun. Here are five beginner-friendly project ideas your child can try this week — no experience required, just curiosity.
1. An Animated Greeting Card
Pick a character sprite, add a background, and use the "say" and "glide" blocks to make it pop onto the screen with a birthday or holiday message. It's a gentle first project that introduces sprites, costumes, and simple animation.
2. A Maze Chase Game
Draw a simple maze as the background, then use arrow-key controls to move a sprite through it without touching the walls. This project is a great introduction to keyboard input and collision detection.
3. A Virtual Pet
Create a sprite that changes costumes and "moods" based on how often the player clicks to feed or play with it. It's a fun way to explore variables, since kids can track hunger or happiness as numbers that go up and down.
4. A Quiz Game
Use the "ask and wait" block to pose trivia questions and check the answers, keeping score along the way. This is a great step toward understanding conditionals — if the answer is right, do one thing; if not, do another.
5. A Bouncing Ball Animation
Get a ball sprite bouncing around the screen and off the edges using the "if on edge, bounce" block. Simple to build but surprisingly satisfying, and it opens the door to physics-inspired projects later on.
Once your child has tried a few of these, they'll have the confidence — and the building blocks — to start dreaming up projects entirely their own. Our Code Explorer course walks through projects just like these, step by step.