User Guide

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To close the current project and open another:
1. On the Application Menu, click File, and then click
Open…
2. Browse to the file that you want to open, click it, and
then click OK.
Using the Stage
All of the sprites in your project appear on the Stage, and this is
where all of your actions and scripts take place. A sprite cannot
completely leave the Stage. However, you can hide sprites that
are not needed at specific parts of your project.
In Scratch, the Stage is always 480 steps wide and 360 steps tall.
It never changes size, it never moves, and it never resets. For
example, once a sprite moves it remains at that position on the
stage until another script moves it. The position of each sprite is
described with a coordinate – two numbers, one that represents
the horizontal position (x) and one that represents the vertical
position (y). The top-left of the Stage is -240,180, the bottom-
right of the Stage is 240,-180, and this makes the center of the
Stage 0,0.
In the Sprite List, there is an image for the Stage. If you click this,
you can add blocks to the Stage itself. When the Stage is
selected, the tabs at the top of the Scripts Area change.
You can change the background of the Stage from the
Backgrounds tab. You can either use the Paint Editor to draw a
new background (The Paint Editor is described in section 4.9 The
Paint Editor on page91), or import graphic files. Imported
graphics should be 480 pixels wide and 360 pixels tall, or Scratch
will position them in the center of the Stage surrounded by
borders of the current background color.
You can have multiple backgrounds in a Scratch project, but only
one can be visible at a time.