Programming Languages

Programming Languages

 Describe your experience building a program using Scratch.

    During my personal experiences, block coding is an effortless way for someone to explore the world of coding and understand computational thinking. It is very forgiving and easy to play around with different functions and strings to enhance your building projects. However, this type of coding can be time-consuming. Another experience I had was with the overall fun one can have with building these block projects to explore the possibilities of your mind.

Identify the difficulties that you encountered in Scratch.

    Guides and tutorials on the scratch website make it relatively easy to pick up with comprehensive guides. Lack of knowledge was my most considerable difficulty, if anything because I don't know all the possibilities or capabilities; however, it is easy enough to pick up with a little more time; in my opinion, 

Explain how you overcame the difficulties.

    Any difficulties that I had were easily overcome by utilizing the resources provided by Scratch. 

Describe the insights that you gained about programming from this exercise.

    The insight I found with block programming is that it doesn't take a brainiac to learn it and that anyone can quickly pick it up and explore their imagination. Block coding is great for visual learning and just an excellent building block for people looking to learn or computational thinking, especially because written code and having to create your own string of code can be way more confusing and overwhelming for someone to get into programming. As far as programming in general, I think the most considerable insight is the pure enjoyment behind it

    Compare your experience programming in Scratch with the participation activities in Sections 2.8, 2.9, 2.10, and 2.11 of the textbook that explored machine language, assembly language, and high-level languages, such as Python.

    When it comes to my experience, I have very little python knowledge; however, I spent many hours using Scratch, but as I mentioned earlier, it can be very time-consuming. Instead, what I do know is that Python eliminates the need for copying and pasting repeated instructions. Rather, it loops the instructions by as many times as specified (2017, Vahid & Lysecky).

Describe the differences between the programming languages.

    The difference between block coding over any other computer language such as python is that it eliminates all possibilities of syntax error that can be seen in the texted based program; as I mentioned above, block coding is very forgiving.

Identify which language you found easiest to use.

    Although Python may be one of the easier languages to learn, especially when you look at how powerful the language is, I still find block coding to be the easiest to understand and play around with because it is so forgiving. 

Describe scenarios where each type of programming language would be most effective.

    Block programming, I believe to be most effective for beginners to show people code is not that boring after all but it helps develop the mind to think in a computational way more naturally that can help with learning text-based codes. 

    Explain which programming language you think is the most popular and why.

    I think both programs can be equally important depending on which way you look at them; both generate pros and cons. Block building gives someone the chance to learn code without being overwhelmed right away by standard traditional written code that can create syntax errors. Block building has its limitations compared to a program like Python; Python would be most effective because its robust nature makes it the more popular programming language. 

                           Scratch Project Link: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/592926110

References:

Vahid, F., & Lysecky, S. (2017). Computing technology for all. Retrieved from zybooks.zyante.com/