I'm currently planning a series of scratch lessons for a Year 5 class that will, amongst other things, involve coding Space Invaders. However, half of the time we only have access to iPads. I'd like to be able to have the children control the ship using the arrow keys but on the iPad the keyboard only pops up when you type into a text entry field.

I don't have an iPad myself to test this, so can only use the ones at school. But is there a way of having the on-screen keyboard appear on screen on an iPad without having a text entry field? So they can code Scratch to take left and right arrow keyboard input and have it work both on the iPad and laptop?

Help would be appreciated.

I don't believe the iPad keyboard can do that, but you can actually buy a little keyboard for the iPad to do that, so it works like a computer keyboard. Otherwise, I hope Scratch can make an update for that.

We're suffering from the same problem and would love a solution to it too!

So how do you do it???

Well there aren’t any arrows on the iPad keyboard anyway (I’m typing with it right now) so the only way is to use a wireless keyboard connected to to the iPad. Other from contacting Apple Support, I don’t know how to help you.

Or create on-screen buttons to control things rather than using a keyboard - you could give the option to use buttons or keyboard at the start.

@deck26
Yeah, but that’s beside the point.