31–40 of 49 posts
My son is finally make his space shooter the way he envisioned because of the new clone sprite action. Exciting times ahead, here is a pic of him getting down last night: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BJ3OudQCQAALZCc.jpg:large
Does anyone have any recommendations on at what minimum age should this be introduced to kids? The website recommends 8-16 years, but then I was doing real programming at the age of ten, so eight may not be the best answer. My son is five right now. Introducing too early seems to have a downside that if my son does not like it (or cannot grasp it), he develops a negative feeling towards it like boredom or else, and t…
My son is finally make his space shooter the way he envisioned because of the new clone sprite action. Exciting times ahead, here is a pic of him getting down last night: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BJ3OudQCQAALZCc.jpg:large
I had to implement some unsatisfying hacks to make my Scratch shooter work as well! If I remember correctly I was manually duplicating the master projectile and I had to register each projectile against each enemy.
I'd love it if anyone could give a good head to head on Scratch 2.0 vs. Snap! 4.0[1] (the new name for BYOB, Berkley's Scratch spin-off). I realize that Snap is aimed more teaching high school/college CS, but they're seeming to converge a bit. I don't have a CS class this year, so I haven't set aside enough time to dig into the latest versions of Snap or Scratch. If anyone has any insight to share, it'd be greatly ap…
From a purely technical perspective, the biggest difference is that the Berkeley team (Snap) re-implemented in JavaScript, and MIT (Scratch 2.0) in Flash. The former also uses XML as a format, the latter JSON (in 2.0). Like you say, Snap's main difference is it makes some more advanced CS concepts more overt, primarily for use as a teaching tool for older students. To this end, it doesn't have the deep social integra…
My son is finally make his space shooter the way he envisioned because of the new clone sprite action. Exciting times ahead, here is a pic of him getting down last night: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BJ3OudQCQAALZCc.jpg:large
I had to implement some unsatisfying hacks to make my Scratch shooter work as well! If I remember correctly I was manually duplicating the master projectile and I had to register each projectile against each enemy.
Megaman could apparently only shoot N bullets at once (3 or 5, I forget). Thus, they only ever had 5 bullet objects, iterated through a list to see if the bullet was shot or not, and only let you fire if there was a spare bullet.
I thought it was very clever. Sounds like you did much of the same thing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had to implement some unsatisfying hacks to make my Scratch shooter work as well! If I remember correctly I was manually duplicating the master projectile and I had to register each projectile against each enemy.
Using Alice 2.2 (which also doesn't allow cloning/instantiation) my students had a similar issue, and solved it by using what they called "Megaman logic". Megaman could apparently only shoot N bullets at once (3 or 5, I forget). Thus, they only ever had 5 bullet objects, iterated through a list to see if the bullet was shot or not, and only let you fire if there was a spare bullet. I thought it was very clever. Sound…
https://www.evernote.com/shard/s4/sh/90b814fd-df52-4fcf-9127...
Does anyone have any recommendations on at what minimum age should this be introduced to kids? The website recommends 8-16 years, but then I was doing real programming at the age of ten, so eight may not be the best answer. My son is five right now. Introducing too early seems to have a downside that if my son does not like it (or cannot grasp it), he develops a negative feeling towards it like boredom or else, and t…
Does anyone have any recommendations on at what minimum age should this be introduced to kids? The website recommends 8-16 years, but then I was doing real programming at the age of ten, so eight may not be the best answer. My son is five right now. Introducing too early seems to have a downside that if my son does not like it (or cannot grasp it), he develops a negative feeling towards it like boredom or else, and t…
(Note that we mix kids, with ages ranging from 5 to 14, and always a 50/50 ratio of girls/boys, not via quota but because of the way the events are planned. So we also have older kids. It's good for the younger ones.)
At this age, they (usually) don't read, so they generally are working with an adult and another kid, or in some instance with an older kid (my just 6 years old daughter for example worked one of the firs times with an older girl that knew Scratch.)
A very important thing to do is to let the creative direction to the kids. Don't force the programming of a shooter on them. They have lot of ideas, and they will be more motivated if the idea come from them. Also they will be proud to see it happen. They'll want to move things, animate, etc. They'll want to copy things they have seen. Letting them draw on paper, for example a character, then taking a picture and incorporating it in Scratch is a nice way to alternate between two different activities (solving the "will they focus for long?" question)
If you want to know more: http://codinggouter.org and my talk at FOSDEM: https://fosdem.org/2013/schedule/event/coding_gouter/ may be helpful
Does anyone have any recommendations on at what minimum age should this be introduced to kids? The website recommends 8-16 years, but then I was doing real programming at the age of ten, so eight may not be the best answer. My son is five right now. Introducing too early seems to have a downside that if my son does not like it (or cannot grasp it), he develops a negative feeling towards it like boredom or else, and t…
2.0 may have been a long time in the making, but I just bought the Scratch Adventure book for my kids last week, which uses 1.4, unaware of the pending update. When I went to the site to download Scratch, it was down while preparing for the 2.0 release. I thought it was a pretty ironic introduction to programming, always new shiny objects.
Indeed! Don't let that stop them from having fun, though. For the book, you can still download 1.4: http://info.scratch.mit.edu/scratch_1.4_download And all the games should still work in the new 2.0 interface too; it's an overhaul of the development environment, with backwards compatibility. (I'm updating the book now for 2.0, I edited it.)