Using a more standard measurement of direction (i.e. - 0 degrees for right, 90 for up, 180 for left and 270 for down) would be much more useful as a tool. This convention would reflect the method used by most teachers.

Interesting suggestion! I think the directional system used in Scratch has been disputed for a long time - and there are many arguments for each side. (You can see one discussion that took place on the original Scratch website here. While having zero represent the right might be more accurate to the directional system in mathematics or other programming languages, I think the main issue is that by changing this, most projects on the Scratch website would become broken. This is because we have been using the existing system for a long time. I'm not against the change, but I just think it's worth considering how much work would be involved to change this just so it would be more similar to another directional system.

Thanks for the reply! As a teacher, my hope is to use Scratch to help students develop better understandings of principles that involve sine, cosine, tangent. The current directional system makes these values ‘wrong’ when compared with a standard system. I'm a big advocate of using Scratch, and I think that this standardization would make this resource much more valuable to educators.

Lucario621 wrote:

Interesting suggestion! I think the directional system used in Scratch has been disputed for a long time - and there are many arguments for each side. (You can see one discussion that took place on the original Scratch website here. While having zero represent the right might be more accurate to the directional system in mathematics or other programming languages, I think the main issue is that by changing this, most projects on the Scratch website would become broken. This is because we have been using the existing system for a long time. I'm not against the change, but I just think it's worth considering how much work would be involved to change this just so it would be more similar to another directional system.

maybe it could make it so when they are released, the point in direction (90 v) code would be changed from that direction, to direction wanted - 90, become obselete (but still works) and then a new block, point in the direction (0 v) could be introduced and it would do the same thing, except direction wanted, not direction-90.