Archive for March, 2023

Using weather data in Scratch

Friday, March 31st, 2023

In this post, I want to share an example of Scratch projects that use live weather data.

At the Raspberry Pi Clubs Conference last week, I talked about the idea of Scratch projects that use live data: projects that do something different every time you run them, based on when or where they are run.

I love this idea. It’s something I’ve talked about many times – like when I tried bringing NASA data into Scratch, or when I built Scratch extensions for different web APIs, such as Wikipedia, Twitter, and Spotify.

I think doing this brings a new perspective to Scratch. Live data can bring projects to life.

So I thought I’d share another example: this time, weather data from Open Meteo.

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How to make your own Scratch extension

Thursday, March 23rd, 2023

A workshop I prepared for the Raspberry Pi Clubs Conference about how to create your own custom Scratch blocks.

This workshop is a step-by-step guide for how to create a Scratch extension.

I created it for educators and coding group volunteers, who would like to customize Scratch for their students by giving them new and unique blocks to create with. In particular, I wanted to make this accessible to people who perhaps don’t necessarily think of themselves as developers and wouldn’t otherwise know how to clone the Scratch Team repos and start hacking it.

I’ve wrapped all the complicated bits in scripts that set everything up, and prepared an online Scratch extension development environment – so everything can be done in a web browser without having to install or configure anything on your own computer.

I’ve included step-by-step instructions for building different types of Scratch extensions, including Scratch blocks based on web APIs, and Scratch blocks based on JavaScript modules from npm.


workshop video on YouTube

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