Scratch

Galleries are easy to create (too easy---there are way too many galleries). 
Just go to galleries when you are logged in as a scratch user, and it'll ask you if you want to create a new gallery.

Doing a "names" project is a good one, as it can be trivially simple or massively complex, depending on the interests of the programmer.  If you do names projects, please add them to the Names Gallery, which needs a lot more stuff in it!

The "pushing the limits" gallery tends to have difficult projects.

If you want to teach double buffering, then having scrolling credits or a scrolling "background" using two coordinated sprites is a good challenge.

double buffer is possible?  wow - so much to try and 3 weeks of school left   

Hi,
I am going to try JAVA for non geeks next year. I like Scratch as an intuitive gateway to programming. Do you know of any resources that would bridge the activities developed in scratch with a JAVA or C++ ?

kevin_karplus wrote:

You could try alice (http://alice.org ).....  It is harder to work with than scratch, and creating new animatable objects can't be done within alice, but it might be a friendly transition to java.

Since the costumes for sprites can have transparent backgrounds, you could import a series of Scratch costumes as textures for a billboard in Alice and then just write a short method to display the textures in sequence (see the Alice "fire" animation in their special effects gallery).

I personally have trouble going from the .gif format to .png (which Alice likes) and keeping transparency - but it's not something that's to hard to recreate if it's lost.