291–300 of 397 posts
https://github.com/MoserMichael/jscriptparse
i would really appreciate some some feedback on my side project
Not a Scratch user. Also not a child here. A grown up software programmer. But I did try Scratch and I could not make much sense of it. Maybe I am missing something. So read this comment as a request for help. The last time I tried, I remember I had to drag and drop building blocks available as tiles. Some tiles made the character turn right. Some tiles did something else. Some implemented conditionals. Am I remember…
Despite the apparent simplicity, you can develop very advanced game mechanism. The limitations occur when you want to give a professional finish. It is meant for children, but it is a pleasure also for the "parent teacher" because it allows to teach advanced ideas.
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Just want to say thank you! Two of my kids are using scratch regularly (8yo and 6yo). We started using the rpi module and I was surprised how easy it was to start banging out pins to control some motors. The fact that they can use it on a desktop, on a tablet, and it is integrated at school is just fantastic. I used Lego mindstorms ~15 years ago, and LabVIEW 10+ years ago. Scratch has much clearer concepts and patter…
Curious how you get a 6 year old started? What should I buy or do?
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> We build and support Scratch to provide creative tools for anyone to explore computation in a from that is relatable and has a low floor for understanding/entry. I love this philosophy. Computing is so much more than application development. It's a creative tool, and exploration tool, a tool for finding insight and exploring spaces. Giving people access to those tools without gatekeeping or accidental complexity is…
Truth is, QBASIC was one of the best programming environments for beginner programmers. Sure it wasn't sophisticated like Turbo Pascal or Smalltalk, but with a single button you could switch back and forth between running your code and live-editing it. If an error occurred you could correct it and continue from where you were. Unfortunately when you got too close to the 640KB memory limit it was no longer possible to…
Full disclosure: Principal Software Engineer here on the Scratch backend... Scratch is not built to be a "teach your kid programming languages" system, it is based on the work and ideas of the Life Long Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab (the director of this group is Professor Mitch Resnick, the LEGO, Papert Professor of Learning Research). The Papert part is where the term Mindstorms comes from ( https://www.a…
With the scratch language I'm not so sure. I feel it's just imperative programming where you can't make a syntax error. You can put strings where numbers go and the semantics is unclear. Parallelism only works through events. Does the IDE provide so much more than Greenfoot and the like do not?
My 9 year old daughter surprised me yesterday with her little game made with Scratch. I was impressed. I surprised her back when I did user-testing haha. She discovered the fun world of bugs and user's doing things they shouldn't!
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What’s NI?
National Instruments. https://www.ni.com/en-us/shop/labview.html
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Wow. Thanks for posting! I’m curious of your thoughts on other visual programming languages. Specifically LabVIEW. My first job out of college was at NI where they heavily use LabVIEW. Every engineer in my cohort thought that paradigm was going to take off and over a decade later, it clearly hasn’t. One large factor is cost and proprietary tech, but I’m surprised few outside of the hardware testing world even know su…
Just some pretext, I am quite experienced in LabView. One of the major issues with visual languages is not being able to find the right chunk. Yes there is a search feature, but if you don't know the right word to search you are doomed. In my time as a undergrad research assistant I was pumping out complex LabView code and VI's to control whole experiments. But I still would run into problems where I couldnt for the…
how is that different from serching the right function or library in java or python or any other language?
either you know what to search for or there is good documentation or you have to ask somewhere. i don't see how visual languages fare any worse here. except maybe that the visual chunks don't help as much in memorizing their name so you end up searching more often to find it again.
instead of innately knowing the syntax to do something
any syntax of functionality needs to be learned somehow.
Full disclosure: Principal Software Engineer here on the Scratch backend... Scratch is not built to be a "teach your kid programming languages" system, it is based on the work and ideas of the Life Long Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab (the director of this group is Professor Mitch Resnick, the LEGO, Papert Professor of Learning Research). The Papert part is where the term Mindstorms comes from ( https://www.a…
I love alternative models of computation and the EV3 mindstorms language was very nice with a type system (including coercion rules) encoded in puzzle shapes, dataflow through "pipes", parallelism through diverging code paths. With the scratch language I'm not so sure. I feel it's just imperative programming where you can't make a syntax error. You can put strings where numbers go and the semantics is unclear. Parall…
why is that a problem?
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National Instruments. https://www.ni.com/en-us/shop/labview.html
Ahh I thought it was Native Instruments - music production is a lot like graphical programming in some sense: you perform a bunch of mathematical operations on sound data by turning knobs, dragging waveforms and drag-and—dropping snippets