Scratch is “the world’s largest coding community for children and a coding language with a simple visual interface that allows young people to create digital stories, games, and animations.” This was my first-time using Scratch so at the time of making my own story, I had to refer to the tutorials quite a few times. One thing I noticed is that it was best to write a bit of the story, run it, and then continue to add to it. This ensured that what I entered did what I wanted to happen. It was best to have test runs throughout the process.
The difficulty I encountered at the beginning was not realizing that that if I wanted my sprite to switch from one costume to another to animate it, I needed to enter at least a second wait time in between the costumes so it would create the motion I wanted. Otherwise, the costume overrode the last costume listed first which just made it stay in the position of the last costume in the script. The wait one second block enabled a pause then moved into the next costume. I also ran into an issue when switching scripts and wanting to hide two of my sprites. I tried to have one long running script and could not figure out why I could not attach the “when backdrop switches to” block to the previous block. Then I realized this like me defining another function in the script and was able to figure out how to make my sprite hide and show when I wanted in my story.
I have previous experience with Python programming, so I thought using scratch would be easy. Some insights I gained about programming from this exercise is that you must make sure each line is specific, and you cannot skip a step, or the script will not work how you expect it to. Scratch and the activities in our book where very similar because you have input and output but with simple language. Another difference is that scratch already defined the variables for you, where in Python you define your own. Since I learned Python programming first, I found scratch easier to use. The language made it easier to write my story once I understood the process.
Scratch style programming would be most effective when developing interactive musical stories and games as well. Python programming would be most effective for developing websites and software. Python would be best for task automation and data analysis. I think JavaScript is the most popular coding language as it requires no prior coding experience or knowledge. It is one of the easiest languages to learn (Berkeley Extension, 2022).
References
Berkeley Extension. (2022). 11 Most In-Demand Programming Languages in 2022. https://bootcamp.berkeley.edu/blog/most-in-demand-programming-languages/
Vahid, F., & Lysecky, S. (2019). Computing technology for all. zyBo
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