Today I'd like to talk about my initial step into the programming world. I had the opportunity to utilize a program known as Scratch. First, I reviewed the tutorial in the Scratch program. I found the tutorial to be insightful, but it seemed to over simplify the process of how the blocks interact with each other. I played around with the program for about 20 minutes and started to get the hang of the process. I decided upon what I wanted to make and came up with a first draft. Some of the challenges that I noticed after creating my initial first draft was that the system took the blocks I had placed literally. This meant that my dialog and movements were not matching up with the timing that I wanted. This caused me to have to put in pauses to allow the audience time to see what was written and to demonstrate a more natural look. Another difficulty I had was having my program reset itself and make a solid transition between the different backgrounds. I overcame this by placing condition blocks associated with changing backgrounds that reset my character’s position. The final challenge I experienced was when I added a second character, but only wanted him to participate in the second background. I had to add blocks to hide him and reveal him when it was appropriate for my story.
I found the utilization of Scratch to be easier cognitively, and less intimidating than the programming exercises from the textbook. However, I did notice the overall similarity in the process. Python is a language that has a lot of formulas that you need to directly interact with in order to code. In contrast, Scratch’s program hides the majority of the formulas and physical code behind “blocks.” These blocks make initial learning of the concept of coding much easier, but my perception is that once you learn the formulas then Python would be a much more effective code because you can adapt it to what you want by adjusting your formulas. I find Python to be more popular because higher end coding is needed for more complex systems. Personally, I believe that C++ and Java Script are the most popular languages, but that is from a novice point of view.
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