Programming Languages and an Exercise in Scratch

 

During the first week of class I learned basic information on programming languages in our reading assignment in our textbook TEC 101: Fundamentals of Information Technology & Literacy (Vahid, 2019). I learned about machine language, assembly language, high-level language, and Python. Each of these sections had an exercise to familiarize the student with the program languages. With practice and application, I am sure that I would have a better understanding of each of these programming languages. After learning the basics of these programming languages, I had some practice programming in Scratch. This is the animation that I created using Scratch: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/711340749/

I started playing around with Scratch when I had a few minutes of free time at work the other day. I noticed that the commands were basic and easy to piece together, but I could not figure out how to start the program. A couple days later I sat down to work on this assignment and found a way to resolve this problem using “Tutorials” the top of the screen and a video, “Getting Started.” I found “Events” as the fourth option down. This is where I would find the buttons that would make things start to happen. My initial idea was to create a simple animation that is started with the click of a button. There are other options to start events, but I just wanted a simple click of a single button to start the animation. Now that I determined how to start my sequence of events, I needed a character for my animation. At the bottom right of the screen, there is a little cat face, which, when selected will take you to a variety of “Sprites” or people, animals, and objects. I selected animals and found my character “Dinosaur3” a pterodactyl, my 3-year-old son’s favorite dinosaur. Next step is animating my character.

            Initially, my idea of making a pterodactyl fly from one part of the screen to another part of the screen seemed pretty easy. The pterodactyl would start at the top right corner of the screen by putting in coordinates that I selected. The next command would send my pterodactyl to the bottom left of the screen. This part was simple, but the pterodactyl’s wings were still during this flight. Instead of turning to the tutorials or YouTube, I tried to solve this one on my own. I found at the top left of the screen, in “Costumes,” there can be multiple different graphics for your character or item, and you can edit the graphics and create your own new costume. Here, I found two different positions for my pterodactyl and going back and forth between these two would show my pterodactyl to flap its wings. Going back to “Control” I found a command to repeat this flapping animation multiple times. At first my pterodactyl would glide across the screen to the bottom left and flap its wings in that location. I found that I needed to start another group of controls where I would have one to move the pterodactyl and the other to make the pterodactyl flap its wings. Eventually I timed everything where the pterodactyl flapped its wings while flying.

            I learned quite a bit in Scratch already at this point, even adding a “caw” from my pterodactyl, but I needed to add something else to the animation. I added another “Sprite” to my animation, an unsuspecting snake. The snake would also have two groups of controls for its animation. The pterodactyl would grab the snake and fly off with it. The snake would then fall to the ground and slither away. Besides making the timing of my animation work together, I had very few issues from this point on. There were always the tutorials and YouTube if I would get into a bind with my project.

             After playing around with Scratch for a few hours, I thought back at the programming languages that I read about in our textbook. Scratch was most similar to Python than the other programming languages. They are both very user friendly when it comes to putting in commands. Tim Statler wrote in Comp Sci Central, “Python is a very high-level programming language because its syntax so closely resembles the English language. Higher-level means it’s more readable to humans and less readable to computers. Likewise, Lower-level means less readable for humans and more readable for computers (Statler, 2022).” Higher-level programming languages have slower execution times because the programming has to be translated into machine code for the computer to process it.

 

References

Vahid, Frank, (2019, February). TEC 101: Fundamentals of Information Technology & Literacy.

Statler, Tim, (2022). Comp Sci Central. Is Python a High-Level Language?