Liked: Scratch is a big deal | Bryan Braun – Frontend Developer

Interesting take on Scratch by a Developer & parent.

This recent growth has caused Scratch to break into the Tiobe index’s top 20 most popular programming languages. At the time of this post (July 2022) it ranks 21st, above Typescript, Rust, Julia, and other important languages. The Tiobe index is imperfect but there’s clearly something happening here.

Bryan points to some

It’s pretty impressive how ambitious the projects get. Scratchers often build copycats of “real” games like Cut the Rope, Super Mario Bros, and Terraria. Features like cloud variables allow them to make online multiplayer games, like Taco Burp (popular in my house)

This is quite a different degree of scratching than I’ve seen in my and other classroom recently.

The REST APIs enable third-party tooling like Turbowarp—a parallel site that can run Scratch projects 20x faster.

 

A bit clicking leads to Paper Minecraft v11.6 (Minecraft 2D) on Scratch!

A lot of food for thought, I never spend much time with scratch beyond preparing and experimenting with the most basic of things. I am not sure it is a rabbit hope I want to peer down for long. I think the simple types of things we do in class are enough for most of the pupils (along with micro:bits, lego and other coding). The advanced projects might be useful to point some of the more confident pupils at.

Liked Jonomancer — Don't Lie To Me About Web 2.0 (accordion-druid.tumblr.com)
“First there was web 1.0, which was, like, geocities pages and stuff, and it was decentralized. Then there was web 2.0, which was the centralized silos of social media - facebook, twitter, etc. Now Web3 is gonna re-decentralize everything by letting you own your own data on the blockchain…” No! Stop there! Web 2.0 was not social media! You’re rewriting history that’s less than 20 years old! Web 2.0 was:...

My own memory (and blog) tells me Web 2.0 was blogs, wikis, delicious, flickr & rss before it was twitter & facebook. I remember thinking it was the power to pull and aggregate without a great deal of technical know how that was exciting. Back in 2007 I didn’t welcome Facebook. I am pretty pleased with my forsight:

Facebook seems fine, fun etc but it misses the serendipity and easy linking and mashing of data. From my, admittedly very limited experience, it seems you can pull information into facebook but not get too much out.

Although Facebook seems neither fine or fun nowadays.

More from Jonomancer

if you want to make the dream of “buy your Minecraft skin as an NFT and bring it with you to wear in Fortnight!” work (why is this the example every article uses?) you would need to get all the games involved to decide to implement equivalent items, or some kind of framework of item portability, and if you could do that then you wouldn’t need the blockchain!

Jonomancer — Don’t Lie To Me About Web 2.0

It doesn’t seem that web3 will solve our problem fast.

For me Flickr still provides a great example of an open-silo. Flickr not owned by users (although I am happy to pay for my bit), but makes it easy to share, license, mashup and remix in what I think is web 2.0 fashion.

Liked https://twitter.com/brian_bilston/status/1527553852349812736 by Brian Bilston (Twitter)

Today’s poem was written for #WorldBeeDay. It’s called ‘The Last Bee’. pic.twitter.com/6WG2O9HhiD

I’ll be taking this one to school. Nice to see the whole poem in the Alt tag too.

Liked The end of podcasting, chapter 58 by Andy (andysylvester.com)
My response: WHO CARES! I started two podcasts (Convocast and Thinking About Tools For Thought) without any media empire support. Did I make any money? No, but that wasn’t why I created those podcasts. I did it for fun and to share information/perspectives with others.

I’ve podcasted both for fun and as an learning experience for my pupils. This rings true.

Liked The Logos, Ethos, and Pathos of IndieWeb by Chris AldrichChris Aldrich (boffosocko.com)
The IndieWeb is attempting to remove these barriers, many of them complicated, but not insurmountable, technical ones, so that we can have a healthier set of direct interactions with one another

This is a lovely essay on the IndieWeb. Too many quotable sentences:

Venture capital backed corporate social media has cleverly inserted themselves between us and our interactions with each other.

Someone has archived the Art Bits from HyperCard

This stack is fantastic for showing off just how much Apple could do with two colors.

Slowly, painfully, torturously, methodically—I’ve clipped out over 700 of these ******* things and stuck them on this page at their original size for your use and enjoyment. The entire thing is less than 300kb, after all the PNGs are optimized.