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Scratch is a big deal

bryanbraun.com

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Re: Scratch is a big deal

#161

Post by gs17 »

ModernMech wrote: post #21

Scratch is great, but the problem is: where do kids go after scratch? Often they are transitioned directly to professional-grade languages and developer tools, which has the effect of turning what was once fun to something scary and frustrating. Many kids stop their PL development right then and there, writing it off as something “not for me”. I find this sad, as it means a lot of people who might otherwise benefit f…

Another student in the lab I'm in has been working on something [0] to bridge between a Snap!-like environment (so, very similar to Scratch) to Python, complete with retaining the concept of sprites having separate code with event handlers and using blocks they'll recognize for sniplets they can drag in to get code that implements the same functionality. I believe it also allows importing of projects made with blocks. It's still very WIP but we're hoping it helps students smooth the transition from blocks.

[0] https://github.com/dragazo/PyBlox

Re: Scratch is a big deal

#162

Post by hansoolo »

HorizonXP wrote: post #5
jawns wrote: post #2

One of my earliest memories of writing code was playing Gorillas, a QBASIC game, on my school's PC in the early 90s. My friends and I would tweak the source code to make the gravity stronger or weaker, or make other interesting mods to the projectiles. For me, it was a perfect introduction, because there was an already written, already playable program, and I could dive into the code little by little and explore. Scr…

Can you share some here? I’m about to get my 3 year old into Scratch, since it’s already on his RPi. I remember doing the exact same thing in grade school with Gorillas and QBASIC. I actually want to download it now and play it again.

3 year old? Why?

Re: Scratch is a big deal

#165

Post by [deleted] »

tylorr wrote: post #154
hooande wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like Scratch is made specifically for game development, since everything revolves around the concept of manipulating sprites. "Guess the number" is a game, but not the kind of game that this tool was made to create.

Using text in games is incredibly common

[deleted]

Re: Scratch is a big deal

#166

Post by ace2358 »

kazinator wrote: post #62
spankalee wrote: post #15

I like Scratch - my kid uses it and I worked briefly with the guy who made Blockly, the underlying visual programming toolkit - but the programming environment makes many things far too complicated with its singular focus on sprites. It's very, very difficult to do things as simple as display a number on screen. My 7yo was making a number guessing game, and to display a two-digit number we had to make two sprites tha…

> My 7yo was making a number guessing game, and to display a two-digit number we had to make two sprites that had 10 "costumes" (0-9) then do modular math to select the costume for each digit So if your kid is cool with this kind of clever workaround for the limitations of some piece of crap, you have a future software engineer.

I thought it telegraphed that maybe the kid is ready for the next level up?

Re: Scratch is a big deal

#167

Post by andrewstuart »

Retr0id wrote: post #142
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you like better about Snap? At a quick glance, it looks almost exactly like Scratch 2.0 (an older version).

The "killer feature" of Snap is the ability to define functions that return a value. In Scratch, you can't do that. Functions ("custom blocks") are just procedures that may-or-may-not mutate global state - This makes it hard to build up abstractions, etc. Scratch effectively mandates that you write spaghetti code.

My vague recollection is there was alot more advantages too.

Re: Scratch is a big deal

#168

Post by dpeck »

There is no better way for people to show that they understand message passing and the actor model than to have them implement a simple scene in Scratch.

Re: Scratch is a big deal

#169

Post by jtbayly »

Code available is awesome for simple games.

I think it was a Q-basic game called worm or nibbles or something that I first “programmed” on. Wanted infinite lives or a very short maximum length. Just had to change a variable.

Re: Scratch is a big deal

#170

Post by whimsicalism »

messe wrote: post #86
ryukafalz wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Minecraft is also slightly an outlier, I would say; its modding community has put a lot of work into making it easier for people to get started. It’s still a far cry from having a “view/edit source” button, though.

If I remember correctly the early days were painful as well, with it being necessary to manually unpack the jar file, and work with deobfuscated decompiled code. I'm not sure what the state of it is nowadays, but I hope its more pleasant. My favourite game from a modding perspective is Kerbal Space Program. Just drop a Mono/.NET DLL into its GameData folder and you're good to go, and code completion works automatical…

I remember having to unpack the jar but I don't remember the function names being obfuscated or anything like that. Then again, this was a while ago.
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