Initially I set out to make a short interactive game for my son Liam to play. The building using Scratch is very straight forward, if I was confused on how to do something, I just watched the video to figure out where I need to go next. I noticed however, since my son cannot read, I had started to create something he will not interact with, and he is still not able to use a mouse, so I decided to change my project to a story. Using the block programing made this very easy, as I was able to still type out to ask questions, and pause for him to think, much like they do in the shows he watches. I just read to him what the Ghost was saying, rather than recording my voice, as that just confused him, and he couldn’t figure out, how I was talking through the ghost. I wanted to create something he could watch and interact with, to see if it could keep his attention and he could finish the short story.
At first, I was going to create two scenarios and allow the choice of YES or NO to help the Ghost get to the Castle, however since he cannot use a mouse, I left the story without the further interaction other than typing in of the name. His name is the only thing he can type now, but this short assignment has given me the goal of creating something he can play in the future, with short commands of Y=Yes and N=No. Since he does recognize some letters, I feel using just those commands in the future would allow him to interact and choose his own path of either helping the Ghost, or not. I was so focused on creating something he would enjoy I kept it very simple but learned a lot. I like that when I make a mistake, unlike the writing of our initials in our book, I can remove or add in what I need, rather than scraping everything and starting over.
I enjoyed the programming experience of Scratch, as I am not familiar with programing so writing a program from complete scratch would have seemed to be an impossible task. With Scratch, everything is broken down neatly into categories and simple blocks, when I want a movement I go to movement, when I want a command or data I go to those categories and choose what I want. There are also preset background and characters to choose from, so I didn’t need to upload anything, draw or really do much of anything other than choose what I wanted the Ghost to do, and how to do it. Python when broken down in our book, seems very straight forward, but I do not think I could create anything now using it, and before this week, I had never even heard of it. I do remember in high school my computer class use C and C++ for an assignment and it also seemed very simple, but I was responsible for other areas of the project, and just learned about it, never used it. I think currectly JavaScript seems to be very popular and used a lot. I know this, as most of the sames my kids play on line use it, most web pages I visit require it, and I hear about it all the time.
Link to my Scratch project - https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/227179330/
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