The next event is on Saturday, April 26, 1-3PM, again at the Rutland Free Library. We are going to do another hands-on event. This time we are going to start working with a programming tool called “Scratch” from MIT. Scratch is another visual programming tool / language. For those of you who participated in the Code.org Hour of Code event, you will notice that Scratch has some similarities to the visual programming approach of Hour of Code. But Scratch has many more programming features, and introduces you to many more programming concepts and ideas.
Scratch enables you to program your own interactive stories, games, sounds and animations. You can also share your creations with others in the Scratch online community. According to MIT’s website, “Scratch helps young people learn to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively — essential skills for life in the 21st century.”
In February, one person had a question about “sprites”. Scratch does allow you to have one or more sprites (visual graphics to represent people, animals, characters, things), that can be animated.
For each sprite, you can tell Scratch to do different things based on different “events”. This is called event-driven programming. For example, you could play a sound, or have a character say something in a cartoon bubble, if the user clicks on something, moves their mouse or presses a key on keyboard. These mouse/keyboard events drive the action on the screen.
I have only started to use Scratch myself, but it is a very nice tool and way to learn and develop programs. I will send out more information later on.
Hope to see you on April 26th to start to learn Scratch programming.
rutland tech club 
check this out: http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/21237176/