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> inviting My first attempt to place a statement (play sound at Hz) failed with a Type Error. Android Chrome.
It's an odd quirk of Snap that they never cleaned up. Some blocks have a "friendly" error message. Delete a variable and uses of it get "Hmmm... a variable of name 'name' does not exist in this context". That one just regurgitates the JS error when it should say "You need to add and select a sound to play a sound".
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It's an odd quirk of Snap that they never cleaned up. Some blocks have a "friendly" error message. Delete a variable and uses of it get "Hmmm... a variable of name 'name' does not exist in this context". That one just regurgitates the JS error when it should say "You need to add and select a sound to play a sound".
Nor does it let me select a sound. The drop-down list is empty.
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Nor does it let me select a sound. The drop-down list is empty.
You have to add one, in the sounds tab you can record one, or in the file menu they have a library of them you can load (they also have libraries of sprites and backgrounds which are pretty useful when we use this with students).
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from someone who can remember how they even got into programming: it's because this is BS and just a toy, it's got no connection to the real world. from the angle of someone trying to make some toy to teach programming, maybe in their head it's like: oh this is so simple and easy it should work perfectly for teaching but from my experience, most of my learning came from "whats this?" "how do i make a thing like this?…
Fair that your path worked differently for you. But "no connection to the real world" is hard to sustain once you look at what people actually build with Snap!/Scratch. The ecosystem is full of bridges to physical stuff: Cameras, microphones, audio, pen plotters, 3D (BeetleBlocks). Snap! 12.1 (video from a few days ago) adds body-language recognition, Bauhaus-style shape compositions, first-class Processes, translati…
so it wasn't the project that was the motivation, it was figuring out how to do it for real, and getting closer to expertise in programming
for example the TurtleStitch, I don't know how to say this exactly, but to me it doesn't strike as something that'd interest people who want to get into programming, but is more like a way to showcase how to do machined embroidery in an accessible way
I might be totally wrong, but my problem seems to be that a lot of this is just about showing off the capabilities of Snap, but it's not really something I would've engaged with for example?
like almost as if the ecosystem simply serves to show off Snap and thus misses the mark?
like Snap doesn't really provide a way to understand how stuff is actually done except for maybe simple logic. So I don't see how it'd be very useful for e.g. learning CS when it's not really something you'd see in the real world, i.e. you're learning a learning platform and some basic concepts
I guess my point is like, if it's not really something that's used in the real world, unlike say JS or Python, why use it instead of getting up to speed in a real language?
again, it could be that I simply don't get it, or that I'm not the target audience, but I feel like there's a reason why these haven't really taken off, and IMO there's no reason why they would need to, because they serve a very specific niche
It's clearly designed for older students, but at that point some of the advantages of blocks are lost.
Most of these systems suffer from the 'canvas' model, where you have many stacks of blocks scattered around the canvas as they are created, possibly in no particular or logical order. It's difficult to find things or to get a good overview, and really becomes a navigation problem as projects get bigger. I think they would greatly benefit from a more traditional ide/file type structure, or some other way to structure 'stacks'.