What we are making: a plan. Nothing on the computer today except writing down what you are going to build.

The brief

Make something in Scratch that somebody else can use without you explaining it. It can be a game, a quiz, a story that the player chooses, or a drawing machine. It has to work when a stranger sits down at it.

That last part is the whole difficulty. Your program will make perfect sense to you, because you wrote it. Session 15 is when you find out whether it makes sense to anybody else.

Four that have worked before

1. A catching game. Something falls, you move left and right, you score a point if you catch it.
2. A quiz. Five questions, a score at the end, and it tells you which ones you got wrong.
3. A maze. Arrow keys move a sprite, touching a wall sends you back to the start.
4. A story where the player chooses. Two buttons, two endings.

Write these four things down

1. What the player does. One sentence. ‘You press the arrow keys to move the bowl and catch the apples.’
2. How they win, or what the point is. If there is no way to win, say what makes it fun instead.
3. Your sprites. List them. Which ones move, and which ones just sit there.
4. What happens first. When the green flag is clicked, what does the screen look like? This is the part everybody forgets and it is the reason games start broken.

Then draw it

On paper, draw what the screen looks like when the game is running. Mark where each sprite starts. You will build it much faster having done this, and it takes five minutes.

Before you leave

• Your four answers, written in your notebook.
• Your drawing of the screen.
• Your teacher's signature on the plan.