31–40 of 54 posts
I hated Scratch. I saw it as childish and simplistic. I wanted to play with the big boy stuff.
Scratch shields you from learning how data is represented even more than Python, and at that age all I wanted to do was make video games. My first "wow" moment was learning how Scratch platformers changed the "offset" to bring objects into view but didn't actually move my characters left and right.
I'm 20 now and got started programming with Scratch sometime before I was 10... don't remember exactly when. I completely attribute it to my interest in programming and is the reason I'm now in school completing a computer science degree. You can actually go into surprising depth with Scratch. For example, I wrote multiplayer game engines using cloud variables to store player position, chat, etc and let people play t…
I'm 40, and I started on Commodore Basic, but my son is 11, and he started on Scratch. I'm curious where this will go. :)
https://archive.org/details/My_Computer_Likes_Me_When_I_Spea...
I'm 20 now and got started programming with Scratch sometime before I was 10... don't remember exactly when. I completely attribute it to my interest in programming and is the reason I'm now in school completing a computer science degree. You can actually go into surprising depth with Scratch. For example, I wrote multiplayer game engines using cloud variables to store player position, chat, etc and let people play t…
dnsge, would you be willing to help me carry out some research? Could you please explain in your own words, that is, without doing any searches, what a cloud variable is? I'm 40, and I started on Commodore Basic, but my son is 11, and he started on Scratch. I'm curious where this will go. :)
If person A uses the project and modifies the cloud variable, person B also using the project at the same time will see the new value update in real time.
Related tidbit about cloud variables: When I was on Scratch, there was no effective limit to the size of data stored in the cloud variable (though you were restricted to "01", concatenate the digits for each letter, and store the number into a cloud variable, and you get a simple encoding/decoding scheme for communicating between players in a game.
When enough projects that (ab)used cloud variables for intensive applications like multiplayer came around, I believe that the Scratch Team restricted the amount of data each can store. This change happened as I was no longer using Scratch much, though, so I can't speak much about it.
I was able to make a 2D platformer with it. Writing the game logic for a small game was not that hard to do in a visual programming language since it was mostly just moving and rotating sprites.