Is Scratch just for kids?
A question that sounds to me like asking whether rocking chairs are just for grandmas.
So, why am I playing around with Scratch?
(If you’re wondering what Scratch is, here’s the link.)
For a personal reason, I decided a few days ago that I would attempt to apply for a web development mentorship run by Huli. I don’t know him personally but I’ve read a lot of his medium posts and I’m really enjoying the way he approaches any challenge in life. Most of his work is written in Mandarin (apologies to those who don’t understand the language) but I’m certain we’ll arrive at a time where Google translate becomes flawless.
Or maybe he’ll start to write in English someday.
Anyway, one of the requirements was to create a simple project in Scratch. I’ve known about Scratch for years and it’s been really inspiring how kids these days have access to tons of resources if they’re interested in computational thinking. So I decided to take a look and play around. Something I think a lot of parents have already experienced during the recent lockdown. Gotta keep the kids busy.
The first thing I clicked on was the explore page. I wanted to get a feel of what people are making and what’s possible. You can sort by popularity, trending, or how recent it was created.
The number one trending project was called Journey. On the page were instructions stating it was mobile-friendly and the creator would report all ads (more on that later). The notes and credits part really spoke to me. It showed immediately how Scratch was very community-driven and how important it was to build on top of each other’s work. I scrolled down and noticed how most of the comments were very encouraging and positive, though it seemed comment posting had been turned off, maybe because of too many ads being posted? Anyway, the game finished loading and I began to play.
This project sure brought back memories from when I still owned a Nokia phone. Aside from the well-known game Snake, another 2D side-scrolling game called Bounce would come pre-loaded.
Basically you control a ball and try to pass through all the obstacles. It was pretty similar to Journey. But Journey had really entertaining explanations like this one below.
The music was also pretty good so I kept it on while writing this. Now I wasn’t here to play games all day so after getting through a couple of levels I decided to check out some other projects. That’s when I noticed the See inside button on the top right corner of the screen.
You could instantly see how the whole thing was created. Right there.
It reminded me of Codepen.
Clearly Scratch has the potential to create almost anything you can think of. Using block-based visual coding proved to be an engaging and less intimidating way of learning about computation concepts. All I needed to do next is probably play around with a few examples and follow a couple of tutorials to get a feeling of the language. Then I can start working on my own little project.
Scratch already has a page full of tutorials and activity guides. The games section seemed interesting so I thought I’d start there.
The tutorials were clear and helpful and if there was something I wanted to understand better, a quick Google search proved to be more than useful. For example, here’s a Youtube clip that explains what all the code blocks do. This helped me get up to speed and understand the syntax of Scratch.
There are so many possible ways to create a game, control a paddle to play Pong with your mouse, click to whack-a-mole, use the keyboard controls, or even motion sensing with your camera. So I started playing around and thought about what kind of game I might want to create. Then I realized… there were already a lot of interesting projects that I had yet to discover.
Super impressed by the creativity on Scratch.
For example this Hunger Games MAP (Multiple Artist Project or Multiple Animator Project). Multiple people contributed to creating a full music video.
And this scrolling game Colors where you control a little block with the keyboard and use your mouse to swing a weapon around to defend yourself from other blocks. I wish I saw this earlier because I was basically creating a much much simpler version of a chasing game.
But the even more amazing part is the remixes (a modified and shared version of an uploaded project) for all the projects. Basically, other people could get a copy of a certain project and build upon that project.
Now if you’re in software this all sounds very familiar.
I guess that’s why Huli wanted us to create a simple project in Scratch.
So, here’s a little game I made.
