Tag: scratch

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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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Liked https://twitter.com/cemocreates/status/1305699520567635968 by Celeste (twitter.com)

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Liked A tweet by Celeste (twitter.com)
Here's my #AnimateYourWorld exploration using the #VideoSensing blocks in @scratch. I wanted to bring my books to life! The blue square recognizes what book I'm reading (based on color of the cover) and populates my screen with some interactive characters. #ComputationalTinkering

This is amazing.

Interactive Storybook Animations Using Video Sensing on Scratch

I made a quick test:

Continue reading →

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Scratch is now at version 3.0. I’ve been looking forward to this as it will now support the iPads my class uses.

I gave it half an hour or so on my iPad and am delighted to say that it does what is says on the tin. The iPad I am using is an Air 1 so a good few years old. It was a little laggy now and again but nothing that I worried about.

I was especially delighted to see that old scratch embeds still word and now work on iOS too the Scratch Embed example on Glow Blog Help just worked.

I also tried exporting a Pyonkee project and then importing it into scratch 3 on the iPad that worked too. Pyonkee is an iOS app that is based on scratch 1.4 that my class have been using.

I look forward to introducing the class to scratch on iOS in the new term.

Here are a couple of useful links:

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Liked Eric Schilling on Twitter (Twitter)
“Tinkering with realtime world creation in @Scratch. Character on the screen is coded to interact with different colored objects. (Black is floor. Red is lava. Green is the goal.) Kids can be creating and coding these worlds simultaneously in realtime. https://t.co/giiR6HCmNR”

I want to track this to see if the “how to” requests get an answer. Looks clever. Might not need much kit?

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Scratchscreen

I run a couple of after school clubs at Sandaig, today was the primary 7 computer club. The number are limited to 12 so that we don’t have to worry about resources and help. I usually have a lovely time. The primary sevens are working on Scratch. After one of the children’s nice flash movies produced last session I was tempted to stick with Flash, but Scratch is getting a lot of coverage so I though I’d try it.

We started exploring the scratch files on the projects page and watching one of the Scratch Videos. The next week the children worked through the Getting Started pdf. We missed the week after as I was at the Scottish Learning Festival and this week the children started on the Scratch cards. They are beginning to get comfortable with the interface and are having a ton of fun. It is lovely watching them find things out for themselves, some quickly found the record sound facility and gales of laughter echoed round the school. Some children quickly wanted to leave the introductory cards and explore ideas for themselves. Quite often these ideas seem pretty advanced and are leading up blind avenues but usually making interesting discoveries along the way. The children worked in pairs and sometimes one group has a solution the others need. I’ve not really explored scratch at all by myself, the children know this which hopefully will give them s sense of pride. I do have enough basic programming concepts to be able to give some help.
I a not sure if the children will be able to progress to the levels of some Scratchers (see for example munkeeb’s Stuff) in the time available, but I am sure they will have fun. I wonder how they would get on if they had an hour or two a day working with this stuff for a couple of weeks, could that work with the curriculum for excellence?