Scratch programming Assessment
The Scratch program was a great way to introduce someone to the programming languages, giving a visual idea of how coding works, and what happens when writing code with visual representation. The program bases the language on if and then statements to write the code using blocks, which represent the statements of the object or objects you want to animate.
Below is a link to the sample game created using scratch programming.
Utilizing the Scratch website to get a better understanding of how programming blocks works, was quite an interesting experience. There was some guidance to help get started, however, running into multiple issues with some of the overall functions of the blocks made developing my game quite difficult. The first difficult situation I ran into, was trying to understand some of how the coding blocks actually worked together; following the initial guides that were provided by the company itself was a good start. However, this information lacked some key factors, like variable creation. I wanted my game to collect butterflies as food for the player (Owl), to increase the score total. After exploring a few different tutorials I was able to stumble upon how variables are created, and the use for them, thus allowing me to create my score capturing. I also struggled at first understanding how the programming worked, after “writing the code”, none of my scripts worked as I had written them, after spending some time troubleshooting and trying to understand why the code was not actually functioning it dawned on me that coding is based on if and then statements.
My next hurdle was trying to figure out the character movements between objects, and how I wanted a movement as a contributor to my game. Originally, I found movement to be quite frustrating as the movement of objects did not seem to be fluid. After looking through some of the command blocks, I found different options where objects would bounce off the walls and respawn in a different location if it were to spawn into the wall of the application field, thus minimizing the butterfly’s spawn location to avoid spawning on the edge of the playing field.
After working with Scratch, I began to understand that each block represented a certain line of code, which all coincided with each other. As I mentioned previously, I also started to understand that the way the coding worked, using if and then statements as a way for the code to make connections with each other to represent each event that would occur. Another learning opportunity that I found is what variables really were and what they actually did, through the hands-on experience, I figured out that variables are stored memory, that the code uses to represent a reference point. I found that Scratch gave a better visual concept of how coding works, whereas in the textbook I found that some of the activities were extremely difficult to understand considering it is showing code as itself. The visual aspect of Scratch allowed us to work with the programming blocks and identify where the issues are occurring as a starting point, the textbook activities were showing minimal issues within the coding lines if the code was not properly formulated.
Programming Language Differences
The differences between the coding language C and C++ are that C++ is known to be an object-oriented language whereas C is procedural. Procedural programming is essentially creating a list of instructions that the computer will run in a step-by-step format. The main differences between C and Python languages are that a compiler is needed to compile the code for C and Python requires an interpreter, and again Python is an object-oriented language where C is not. The difference between Java and JavaScript is that Java is a programming language while JavaScript functions as a scripting language. Java is what programmers use in order to develop applications where JavaScript is what is ran through web-based browsers, and these languages require different plug-ins to function properly. Between Python and JavaScript, these would best be used for scripting and web-based browser development. The C language is best used when developing applications, game developments, and other applications that require calculations. The Java language would be best utilized for mobile developments, considering the Android operating system is Java based, thus, making mobile applications best suited under the Java language.
The programming language I found to be the easiest to use so far, would have to be Python. Python seems to be very straightforward and reduces the amount of code having to be used. I also believe that Python is probably the most popular programming language to date, the reason I believe this has the ability to support multiple different styles of writing code, however, due to the consistent usage of website developments, I would say that JavaScript is the number one programming language used in the world.
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