Forever, Until Done

I’ve been noticing interesting uses, or misuses, of Scratch’s ‘forever’ block.  I applaud Scratch for it’s fail soft policy and understanding the desire of 10 year olds to test things, especially to their limits.

Nested forever loops will get the job done

The ‘forever’ block seems pretty self-explanatory and perhaps that means I don’t introduce it properly. My students tend to use it in 3 ways: repeating actions, for event listeners and for looping background music.

Repeating an action forever

I introduce the forever block after introducing the repeat block.  Once they know about it, there is no going back!

In many games you wait for a certain action to happen to respond to it. One way to do that is to code some ‘if statements’ and set them in a forever loop, like an event listener in other coding languages.

Listening for the win condition

Many, many students want use it for play background music for their games.

Two dance tracks in a forever loop.  Both seem to work, together.

And I think it is with the ‘play sound’ block where things gets confusing.  I am a proponent of ‘play sound until done’ in a forever loop, and the Scratch Wiki concurs, but it seems to work without the ‘until done’ if it is the only thing in the forever loop.

Even without the ‘until done’ this code plays the whole song in an infinite loop

Other things I’ve seen makes me wonder. Why did the Scratcher feel the need to use the forever block?  Was some other code interfering with their action?

What would cause the need for show in a forever loop?

Or are they just testing things to see what works and what fails.

Forever and ever and ever and ever, just in case repeating 10 to the power of 109 times isn’t enough!

Thanks Scratch for not failing them.

Don’t Laugh

The projects for our showcases are finished and have been published on the Scratch site and I’m compiling them onto our school Code Club page in preparation for our final meetings this week when the parents come to see what we have been up to.

Chatbot and Pong game in one project

There are some pretty impressive projects.  And the students’ hard work is evident.  Maze games, Chatbots, Races, Survivor games, Pong types:

Space Pong – hit the portal that matches the ball color.

Then there’s The Epic Game where there are 4 games in one project.  The two girls working on this one came in at recess to work on it and were really motivated to meet their goal of finishing it.

The Epic Game – it took epic effort.

They learned a lot about game flow, how to use broadcast effectively and how making one seemly insignificant change can break everything. And about testing, testing, testing. I thought I would need to show them Rik Cross’s Cheat Codes, but their chatbot like game flow let us quickly get to the game that was having issues.

I’m really proud of all of these projects and coders, even the two, possibly three, Try Not To Laugh projects.  Yes, it seems we have a dancing llama infection.  The first TNTL project was a dancing llama project from Showcase #2 called Super Awesome Llama Man. I wasn’t that impressed with the project makers plan or effort, but it fit his personality and every single 4th grader who sees it seems to think it is hilarious in it’s absurdity. This year the llama man Sprite is back in a couple of Try Not to Laugh projects.  Also is a walking taco and troll face.

Llama is back – TNTL

I okayed one TNTL project but when two students project derailed because they couldn’t agree on how to proceed with their joint project, I okayed their change to a TNTL project.

 

So many llamas

I tried to find funny gifs other than the llama, but they all love the llama.  Really, it’s not funny anymore.