in: barb; barb > 2008-06-09;
| # Posted 2008-06-10 11:01:16 | |
| Terry: | I forwarded this to my friend John M, one of the developers of Scratch. He wrote to me:
I shared this with the rest of the group and left a comment on the project. It's really, REALLY cool to see someone using Scratch to do scientific simulation. (Of course, as Barb writes, the real story is more complicated, but this seems like a pretty good first approximation and a good way to build intuition. I think I'm also going to email this to Alan Kay. He always wanted to see kids doing stuff like this; that was what the Dynabook vision was all about. |
| # Posted 2008-06-10 15:10:10 | |
| barb: | Cool! John is a great guy.
David loves programming in scratch. When I was trying to explain diffusion and osmosis, it occurred to me that it might work if I talked about molecules as Scratch objects. I asked him to imagine starting with a bunch of molecules all moving in different apparently random directions. He wanted to know how they got into that state in the first place. He wondered why you can feel liquids but not air, when both are made up of molecules. David has not yet figured out how to get things to bounce off each other correctly in Scratch. There is a "bounce" command but he says you can only use it off the edge. For a while he was using different colors for the top, bottom, and sides of an object, and just reflecting the direction of the moving object around the appropriate axis (eg 180 - current_direction). Then he saw another Scratch program that implemented bounces differently. (Scratch is very "open access": you can upload your program and other people can run and download your code. Although David doesn't read other people's code; he just looks at the behavior and figures out how to do the same thing.) So now he can make a circle bounce off another circle by having them point at each other (a primitive in scratch), and then use the other one's direction when they hit. Still not right, but more interesting. Anyway, it's fun to see him figure these things out, and it's fun to watch him at work. But I think he needs to find another language now; he's beginning to want to do things scratch doesn't let you do. Like programatically instantiate new objects. But the visual programming aspect is going to be hard to leave behind. |
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