Working With Scratch

"Coding for dummies... dummies that are smarter than me!"

Hey, everyone! It's the Phone Store Guy. 

For my first blog post, we will look at my experience working with Scratch, a visual programming app, for my INT100 class.

            Our first introduction to machine language and programs established that computers only understand 1’s and 0’s. This machine language that they speak is used to interpret and execute instructions from a program. As stated by Vahid & Lysecky, 2017, “Like a chef executes a recipe’s instructions, a CPU executes a program’s instructions.” We practiced building a program using graphical coding on the Scratch website.

I decided to create an animation using the stock characters and graphics. Scratch was an interesting experience, and while the interface is fairly simple, I thought it did a great job demonstrating the flow of programming. Anyone just starting out in programming should come away understanding that a program is simply going to proceed within its given instructions. Most errors or going to be user-generated, as I’d experienced. I encountered difficulties in having characters speak at the appropriate time. I alleviated this by making chat boxes that were triggered by changes in the scene, or the appearance of a character, for example. Much insight was gained in this exercise, namely the potentiality in writing much more powerful programs through higher-level languages. Seeing what other users did in the community pages demonstrated both the potential of programming at large and the limits of Scratch’s graphical-based coding.

Scratch Project: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/656600671/

Exploring Other Languages

Sections 2.9 through 2.11 gave overviews of machine language, assembly language, and high-level languages, followed by a brief introduction to python. I thought this order of introduction was particularly useful for understanding how each language essentially builds upon the other, eventually forming the high-level languages that the programs we interact with today are built on. The concept of assembly language made the most sense to me as I read the text and became introduced to the language. It made sense to create a language that was easily human intractable compared to the 1’s and 0’s that machine language was composed of. Python, the only language given several exercises in this chapter, seems to be the easiest to understand. The text provided other high-level languages for exploration, including C, C++, Java, and Javascript. I also browsed the language popularity list by Tiobe. It was amazing to see the number of programming languages out there and how their popularity rankings fluctuated over the years. According to Tiobe, Python is the most popular language as of March 2022. This is probably due to its open-source nature and ease of use.

Conclusion

            Overall, I enjoyed Week 1’s readings and corresponding assignments. It provided a great introduction to programming and did what I thought was a great job setting the tone for the rest of the course. Introducing new topics followed by interactive activities that provide kinetic learning is perfect for my learning style. While I find the chapter sections of Computing Technology for All to be somewhat brief, I found that YouTube videos provided a good knowledge supplement. I am excited to learn more!