Week 11: Scratch!

This week we explored the beginners world of coding and I tested out the online program scratch. I found the tutorials and the interface to be totally welcoming and I could see this easily being integrated as a tool for creating learning artifacts. At first I attempted to make an underwater game where a diver collects starfish, but I scrapped that and decided to follow one of the nifty tutorials provided. This tutorial on how to make a pong game lent a good introduction to the basics of making a game using the drag and drop Scratch boxes. After completing the tutorial I decided to spiff my game up, making a one level Arkanoid clone. There's still a few bugs... like sometimes the ball gets stuck in a perpetual loop between two walls, the ball doesn't always bounce off the paddle the right way... and for some reason I can't figure out, one has to click the green flag twice to reset the game. The rest works just fine. Enjoy!