The Seasoned Scratcher: What to learn after Scratch (a guide)

Jonathan50

Vim: Vim is one of the oldest and most well-known text editors—if you’re on a UNIX, you already have it installed. It runs in the command line, and requires you to learn several key-combinations to get started. It really is worth it, though, because Vim is amazing for productivity. In addition, several other applications use Vim-style keybindings. It’s an informal standard.

That's not true at all.

Not yet a Knight of the Mu Calculus.

stevekrouse

It's really awesome to see all the incredible options available to keep coding after Scratch. I wanted to share another resource called WoofJS. It is a Javascript framework that is a wonderful transition between Scratch and Javascript.

Woof commands directly correspond to Scratch blocks, allowing students to focus solely on syntax translation. Students don’t have to learn new metaphors and paradigms at the same time they’re picking up their first text-based syntax. Going from move 10 steps in Scratch to car.move(10); in Woof is a small enough jump that students familiar with Scratch can pick it up in just a few hours.

You can go to www.WoofJS.com to take a look!

Last edited by stevekrouse (Sept. 27, 2016 21:14:11)

liam48D

stevekrouse wrote:
It's really awesome to see all the incredible options available to keep coding after Scratch. I wanted to share another resource called WoofJS. It is a Javascript framework that is a wonderful transition between Scratch and Javascript.

Woof commands directly correspond to Scratch blocks, allowing students to focus solely on syntax translation. Students don’t have to learn new metaphors and paradigms at the same time they’re picking up their first text-based syntax. Going from move 10 steps in Scratch to car.move(10); in Woof is a small enough jump that students familiar with Scratch can pick it up in just a few hours.

You can go to www.WoofJS.com to take a look!

That's awesome.

One thing that might be helpful is a more promise based structure, so that you could put a “wait” inside a “forever” and have it work working. I actually started something like that with my own “after” function:

oldAfter = after
after = function(time, unit) {
  return new Promise((resolve) => {
    oldAfter(time, unit, () => resolve())
  })
}

Promise.resolve().then(() => {
  return after(1, 'seconds')
}).then(() => {
  setBackdropURL('http://i.imgur.com/q6Bqraw.jpg')
})

I must say I quite like the “return after” syntax

But in the end it's not as clear as you might hope and beginners are probably just going to need to memorize more syntax (because it'd be tough to explain the full concept of promises to any Scratcher who just happened to want to get started with JS!), not good.

EDIT: What's the equivalent of this, without my own control functions?

forever(() =>
  Promise.resolve().then(() => {
    mySprite.x += 10
    return after(1, 'seconds')
  }).then(() => {
    mySprite.x -= 10
    return after(1, 'seconds')
  })
)

Last edited by liam48D (Sept. 27, 2016 22:22:11)

202e-202e-202e-202e-202e UNI-CODE~~~~~

algmwc5

Jonathan50 wrote:
Vim: Vim is one of the oldest and most well-known text editors—if you’re on a UNIX, you already have it installed. It runs in the command line, and requires you to learn several key-combinations to get started. It really is worth it, though, because Vim is amazing for productivity. In addition, several other applications use Vim-style keybindings. It’s an informal standard.
That's not true at all.

Yep. Vim isn't installed by default on *nix
You need to

sudo apt-get install vim

(on debian based distros) to get vim

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