6.05 Upgrade your project

If you have time, you can upgrade your project. You might have ideas to add more already, or you might want to go back to the first step and look at other projects again for more inspiration.

You could:

• Add more variables that represent things your main sprite wants or needs.
• Check more conditions using if statements, and make your sprite do different things depending on whether the condition is true or false
• Add more sprites that can be used to interact with your main sprite, such as buttons or toys.
• Add animations using graphic effects or costumes
• Add more sound effects

Get inspiration

Each example project in the Introduction has a ‘See Inside’ link for you to open the project in Scratch, look at the code to get ideas, and see how they work.

Small improvements

When you make a Scratch project, there are lots of ways to make sure you’ve done a really good job.

Marginal gains are small upgrades that don’t make much difference on their own, but when added together, they make a big improvement to the quality of your work and speed you can make more changes.

Can you use marginal gains to change one thing now that will help you in future? Things to do:

• Name all sprites, costumes, sounds, variables, and messages sensibly. It’s much easier to understand projects that use helpful names
• Fill in the Project Page with a good title, instructions, and notes, so that users know how to use your project, and where you got ideas from
• Add short comments that explain what your code is doing
• Make sure your scripts are tidy in the Code tab. You can right-click and choose Clean up Blocks or arrange the scripts in a way that makes sense to you. Try and put similar scripts together.