Advanced Scratch Topics: Text Rendering and Text Generators
From Scratch
6 min4th5th6thTechnologyReading & Writing (ELA)
Summary
An advanced tutorial on drawing letters and words onto the stage using the pen blocks and a sprite sheet of letter costumes -- a clever workaround since Scratch has no built-in "print text" pen block.
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All ages
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Teaching resources
Discussion questions
Discussion
This video shows a clever way to draw text on the stage one letter at a time.
- Why can't you just type text directly with a pen block in Scratch?
- How does the project use costumes to stand in for letters?
- Where might a text generator be useful in a project, like a name generator or a scoreboard?
Quick work-a-long
Words to know: text generator, sprite sheet, loop.
Try it: List three places in a game project (title screen, score, instructions) where drawing text on screen would be useful.