Any other Scratchers out there? Share your projects!

[GreeningGalaxy]

I'm personally a huge fan of Scratch, a pseudo-programming language type of thing made by MIT. Yes, I know, as soon as I post this, someone's going to click on that link, take one look, and then want to post something like "Wow, GG, that's for kids! It's totally not real programming! Why would you ever use that for anything serious?"

Please don't do that. I'm aware that Scratch does not use plain text code (well, it kind of does, but that's more complicated) and that its site is 'geared towards all ages,' which is generally just adult-speak for 'designed for small kids.' Yes, it's simplistic, but that doesn't mean you can't do a lot with it! There are a lot of great projects in the Featureds and such, and you can find more by searching around.

While you're there, check out this KSP-inspired spaceplane simulator I made!- http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/25716804/

It's no Ferram Aerospace Research (nor is it 3D), but I did try my best to simulate aerodynamics to a simplified extent. The orbital mechanics are complete crap, but they're not really the point of the project, I suppose.

So, has anyone else made anything cool (KSP/space-related or otherwise) in Scratch? If so, link us to it!

[Lordherrmann]

I remember doing a few little projects with scratch back in high school. Our teacher let us play around with it in the school year's last week, so we really didn't come up with anything serious. Just nonsensical stuff like creating psychedelic colour patterns or letting Scratch play some ball. It was quite funny though.

I think I'll have to get into it again, but with some time I'll try to come up with with some interesting things.

I really like the project you posted here, even though I experienced a little glitch were the ground detection wouldn't work I somehow managed to take off and get the plane into orbit and back. Really nice work with the atmospheric effects and the aerodynamic simulation.

[Nuke]

i prefer real programming. visual programming is great for learning, but not that useful for creating big projects. lego rcx/nxt was nice for getting the basic concepts of programming robotics down, but i quickly switched to nqc/nxc programming and found it much easier to work with for large projects. i dont think i would want to go backwards and use something like scratch. i do a lot of c/++, much on embedded platforms. my most recent project was a software renderer i wrote in c++ for the raspberry pi, which is loaded with bugs and still not working right, but it is drawing shoddy 3d graphics in a pitft screen. i do a lot of arduino projects too, sometimes on custom boards, and sometimes i even ditch the arduino ide and do everything in winavr. i also do a lot of lua, i have a more complete game engine running in pure lua, and i also use lua to build quick gui apps (usually to talk to an mcu over a com port). but i dont do scratch.

one thing that is interesting to note is that textual hardware descriptor languages (such as verilog and vhdl), which are used to design and simulate microarchitectures, replace more traditional circuit/logic diagrams. because when a system gets significantly complex, diagrams become very confusing, very fast. code is just very easy to organize. so for simple little apps scratch might do well. but i wouldn't want to design an os or game engine with it.

[GreeningGalaxy]

The intended implication of the original post was that if you prefer real programming, then this is not your thread.

I'm aware that working with actual code is better for bigger projects; I like Scratch because it's relaxing to be able to dispense with syntax errors and typos while still being able to think in terms of code. Things like the spaceplane sim I made are about as big as I like to get with Scratch, because if you go much bigger then the software starts getting bogged down. The other main reason why Scratch interests me is that, because its learning curve is so shallow, anyone good at thinking with abstractions (who, especially in the case of the younger crowd, might not know any proper programming languages yet) can create some pretty cool stuff without having to read textbooks, take classes, or plug around with CodeCademy for a few weeks.

As I tried to make it easy to see from the start, talking about all the things you do in 'real' programming languages and the reasons why you don't use Scratch is exactly the opposite of the point of this thread.

Thanks for understanding!

[Nibb31]

Scratch is kind of a modern day equivalent of Basic. It's designed to get kids into the concepts of programming.

I still think Basic is great for that, and probably offers more flexibility that Scratch does.

10 Print "Endless Loop"
20 Goto 10

[MegaFlop10]

Yes!

I started playing around with it randomly and I made some silly fighting game with it. I've learned Python now, but I still don't have any ideas of what to do next.

The first serious game I did was Arm Flailer, but it was almost finished before I gave up.

I then made Microwaveable Simulator 2014. Just a quick thing I did in a few hours.

Then I did Super Basketball Tournament on my holiday in Hong Kong. It was my first proper game, with AI and everything.

My last one was Fighter-37, about a jet fighter beating up bad guys. A simple arcade game, it was fun to make though.

I had 32 Scratch projects in my projects folder.

I also did a tic-tac-toe AI that would almost win every time.

[Nuke]

you got to start somewhere. my first programming experience threw me into the deep end with c. this was in the mid 90s and up to that point i didnt even own a computer. later when i finally got a computer, it was a 120mhz processor with 8mb of ram, i dont think you could have run a graphic programming language very well. you would be constantly out of memory. its rather nice that you have things like scratch to play with. it takes an otherwise steep learning curve and flattens it out to the point where a child can do it.

Edited September 13, 2014 by Nuke

[Thomas988]

In 8th grade, my Tech Ed. class used Scratch. We were taught the basics, and then our teacher let us loose to make whatever we wanted for a few weeks. I made 2D EVA game where you controlled a Kerbal and flew around. It worked, but wasn't as cool as you think it'd be.

[Javster]

Yeah I used to use it a LOT. My username on it is Javster