Tag: codeing

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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.

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Screenshot of AgentScratch

AgentScratch | Anaylse Your Scratch Project

Agent Scratch is designed to assess children’s learning of CT skills from the Computational concepts perspective, which can also be defined as the programming constructs. This includes; sequences, loops, events, parallelism, conditionals, operators, variables and abstraction.

This looks really interesting. Pupils can upload a scratch files to do some assessment and analyse what concepts they have used. I’ll be interested to try this out.

I did notice that testing it with the recent COP 26 code along project (from @digilearnscot and @CodeClubScot) that most of the boxes were ticked. Although my class all used the techniques, I don’t think they have got them all yet. I’ll be interested to see how it goes. You can Select the specific programming constructs you would like to include in your analysis I suspect it might be best to dip our toes in one concept at a time.

I did my testing from an iPad, downloading the .sb3 files and then uploading to be analysed worked very well.

There are some Badges, not digital ones, that would be useful for e-Portfolios, or printing and making badges with.

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Earlier this month I read The Web Feels Fine to Me on the CogDogBlog, it contained lots of interesting links to pretty amazing websites. I am still mining the vein.

Along the way I discovered Making your own static web site isn’t nostalgia. It’s the future of the web. – Neocities Blog

For starters, nothing is more creative than HTML. Instead of a sad, tiny, highly constrained little square box to put your thoughts in (that ends up being sold to marketers) on ephemeral social networks that have been scientifically proven to make people miserable and depressed, you get the entire web page to put your thoughts into. Or your drawings. Or your music. Anything you can come up with using your imagination. When you make a web page, you’re not working for your social network’s stock brokers – you’re working for yourself.

Which fitted nicely along with various ideas I’ve been nodding along to recently.

Neocities says We provide free web hosting and tools that allow anyone to make a website. and Neocities will never sell your personal data or embed advertising on your site.

There is a browser based html/css/javascript editor and you can upload files via DragAndDrop.

You get 100mb of space.

It looks like they have education plans:

Neocities for Educators. A lot of teachers have been using Neocities to teach HTML to students. We think this is important, so we want to help them by providing special Neocities features for educators. We are also working on developing an integrated tutorial for those learning how to program HTML for the first time.

We believe that everyone should have the opportunity to learn HTML as a way to obtain technical literacy. It’s also the perfect first step to learning how to design and code software – one of the few careers that keeps growing fast in our information society.

from: Introducing the new Neocities – Neocities Blog

The site is as straightforward as can be, the html editor is pretty nice without being overpowering. It close tags and has nice colour schemes. Uploading files is simple. Perhaps it could be a useful resource for pupils learning a bit of html/CSS/JavaScript as a next step after using some of the online turtorials of the sort Ollie has been blogging recently.

I have kicked the tyres of the site a little producing the rather silly, but fun for me: GifDub (Which probably will not work on Internet Explorer, but seems ok on mobile. )

gif-dub-screenshot