Programming Languages and Scratch
When I initially started using
the Scratch website it was a little difficult to navigate and figure out how to
get started on a project. I wanted to design a quick baseball animation of a
batter hitting a homerun. What I found most difficult was learning how to
animate objects and the fact that each object, or Sprite, had to be coded
separately. I went through some of the tutorials on the website which did help
to get me started, and then it was somewhat trial and error after that. I
understand that each portion of a program has its own code, but I think it
would be beneficial to be able to see the code for all the Sprites on one page
to make it easier to synchronize the timing of the separate parts. Another
thing I noticed is how easy it is to break a program. When I was adding code to
change the size and trajectory for the baseball after the transitioning to the
second backdrop it would not return to the original size or start point at the
beginning of the program. I had to go back to modify the first section of code
to tell the baseball where to appear on the screen and at what size. The
program seemed to function as intended after that. Overall, I think the Scratch
website is a good starting point to learning how computer programs function and
the concepts of coding.
I found the participation
activities in the textbook to be beneficial. They were easier to understand,
but I believe that is because the activities were laid out in a step by step
process for us to complete. The three types of languages discussed in the
chapter were machine language, assembly language, and high-level languages. Machine
language is the only language that a CPU can understand and is written in
binary which is composed of ones and zeros (Vahid & Lysecky, 2017). Machine
language is difficult for most humans to understand and is best utilized in AI
and machine learning applications. According to Vahid & Lysecky (2017) “assembly
language is a textual human-understandable representation of a machine
language's 0's and 1's” which is then run through an assembler for the machine
to understand and process (ch. 2.9, para 1). Assembly languages now mostly used
to speak directly to hardware and are used to configure things such as device
drivers and real-time systems (Pal, 2020). Lastly, and the most popular are
high-level languages. These languages are written to be more easily understood
by humans and give programmers more functionality to create more complex
programs (Vahid & Lysecky, 2017). Nearly all the programs we use today are
written using high-level languages such as C++, Java, or Python which has
become increasingly popular over the past few years.
References
Pal, K. (2020). Why is learning assembly
language still important? Techopedia https://www.techopedia.com/why-is-learning-assembly-language-still-important/7/32268
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