Scratch
The scratch project is an
excellent way to introduce people to programming. The block-based programming
is good for understanding how to create a program's logic. My experience
programming with Scratch was good; there are many tutorials and a great
community that has created wikis and video tutorials. This paper will describe
my experience writing a clicker game on the Scratch platform.
Scratch is a programming project that was developed in
2003 and made public in 2007. It comes with an online and offline editor. I
only used the online editor to write my program. At first, I had to watch
several videos until I understood how the blocks work and how to create things
like variables and the sequence of the logic. One of my biggest challenges was that
there was no video tutorial for using variables. I had to go to the Scratch wiki
to find out how to combine the if-then block with variables. Like any other programming
language, it gets easier the more you practice and learn about the platform. However,
after finding how to work with variable, if-then blocks, loop blocks, and
show/hide blocks, I was able to complete the game.
Python is a high-level object-oriented programming
language like C and Visual Basic. Scratch is more comparable to a multimedia
programming language like Adobe Flash. Comparing both is hard since Python can
be used for more than just multimedia; However, Scratch can save you lots of
programming since each block can have several lines of code in a programming
platform like Python. Python is a more popular language than Scratch because of
all the other types of programs that can be written with Python.
After writing the clicker game, I understand now that Scratch can be a fun tool
to program multimedia quickly. The block language minimizes the time to program
and troubleshoot bugs. Scratch might be limited to the multimedia type of
programming however is a fun way to program and educate people on how to build
programs.
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