Scratch is a block language program that is designed to teach beginners how to put computer code together to design programs. I really enjoyed playing around with Scratch. I think this is a great way to introduce how code works together and it doesn’t require learning syntax to create something. It is extremely user friendly.
I did have some difficulties when I created additional sprites in the program. The sprite, or additional objects, did not run when I played the program. I had created a block program to have two characters interact with each other and when I hit play, only my first sprite’s actions and dialogue would play. Here's a link to my one and only amateur Scratch creation https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/405055142.
As I was building the scene, I realized that I had not completely stopped the scenario from playing and I did not add conditions to returning the scenario to the beginning when I created the scene. I added a few starting points and then I hit the stop button first before hitting the flag to restart my code. But once those items were in place I had a scene that worked!
I believe the insight I gained is that coding can be introduced in a fun, playful way that can engage beginners to develop a base knowledge so they can transition more easily into the more complex coding languages because they have a fundamental understanding of how code flows.
Programming in scratch is very different than programming in Python in the sense that you really don’t know what the commands are to make an action occur in Scratch. Whereas, in Python, you must know exactly what the variables are when writing the code.
Scratch is a simple point and click way to create animation. I think that other machine languages like assembly and python require the user to understand certain concepts about coding, like exact syntax that needs to be written out. Scratch is definitely the easiest of the languages introduced. The point and click UI is very user friendly.
Initially, I thought Scratch is an introductory language to programming but after viewing featured projects I fully appreciate the complexity of the programming language. There were a number of game projects that were intricately put together, using hundreds of blocks of code. This programming language is effective for putting together games. Low level language like Assembly is used for hardware like CPU processing through the translation of binary code to comprehend data as input, add, output and stop. High level language like Python on the other hand is a programming language is more complex. High level language is a language that can manipulate data and perform complex data calculations then compile it to low level machine language. High level language is used in most of today’s programming, there are many variations of high-level language like Python, C+, C++, Java, to name a few (Vahid & Lysecky, 2017).
High-level programming language is more popular because of its capabilities. TIOBE index ranks C as the most popular language, followed by JAVA and Python. The index gathers data on the most frequent search from various search engines. Such popular programming languages have large communities that share libraries of code and overall, the index is an indicator of the languages with which the most code is written (TIOBE, 2020).
Reference
TIOBE. (2020, June). TIOBE Index for June 2020. https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index//
Vahid, F., & Lysecky, S. (2017). Computing technology for all. zybooks.zyante.com/
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