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A Programmer's Perspective of Scratch

CoolScratcher on November 17, 2020

What is Scratch? Starting from the basics and going all the way up to a programmer's perspective, this section is going to have a few su...
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Sylvie Fiquet

The lack of functions in Scratch was the one thing I found truly irritating when I tried it with my kids. You had no choice but to duplicate code and that's really a bad habit for a budding programmer. I hope they added it since.

At the time I found BYOB (now Snap!) that is basically Scratch with functions and is used to teach university students. Maybe it would be of interest to you, although I don't know if the community there is as vibrant.

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CoolScratcher

Scratch has added functions two versions ago in the 2.0 Preview :)
I don't know when you used Scratch, but it has all sorts of things now!

I like Snap! because of the complexity present. However, I feel like it's missing a community. There's no social interaction. It's great if a kid is trying to code, but if someone's looking for feedback or fame, it's not that great.

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Sylvie Fiquet

I had to check: the last Scratch programs my kids made (that I could find!) date back to 2013. So, yes, it was a while ago.

I'm really glad they added functions, that gives it so much more potential!

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mark.exe

BTW, they're not called functions, they're called custom blocks.

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CoolScratcher

Technically. I just avoid scratch terminology since I don't want to confuse non-Scratch users.

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Adam Crockett 🌀

This is a very well written post, scratch and other forms of visual programming are playing a larger role in our community than ever before, just look at node graph based programming in Unreal Engine and others. I have looked to scratch to create a simplistic interface for my product configurator project.

I didn't read this post as "just a kid" but a very switched on individual.

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CoolScratcher

Nice :)

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Sasen Perera

as a fellow scratcher myself, I started with Scratch (my dad introduced me to it).
Now while the rest of my Grade 9 class is learning scratch, I'm over here creating full-stack apps and ethical hacking and very advanced whatnot. so yeah.... I'm grateful for scratch

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Kaamkiya

While my class (grade 8 now) can't code a platformer in Scratch, I get to be making one in JavaScript

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Matt Curcio

You have opened my eyes to how complicated Scratch can get.
I taught Scratch to a bunch of fourth graders and only a few got it.
So congrats!

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CoolScratcher

Yeah, it can get super confusing from time to time.

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Best Codes

I prefer mBlock (another visual based code editor like Scratch). The ability to use micropython and code extensions for it with JS really is a great segway from blocks to real code.