#mit scratch

[lostsemicolon]

This dumbass chicken game is the best thing I made during my brief stint back at community college.

[slitheringstars]

just gonna indulge in a tiny bit of self promo and throw this Scratch escape room game out there that i made :)

https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/640559308

Some previews of the visuals:

[imlxh-music]

The Wall of Fish

Hoo boy, look at the dithering on that image. This track introduces a couple of significant things. First is that this is the first track I ever made on FL Studio. In fact I think I created this on a demo version of the program in one session. Secondly, this is the first song I ever put out which uses a speech synthesizer as the main vocalist. I moved from Indianapolis to Zionsville in the fourth grade, and one of the main differences I noticed was that while the computers in the Indianapolis school system were Windows, most computers at Eagle Elementary ran Mac OS 9 or early OSX. I was immediately drawn to the novelty of this, and found the wealth of MacinTalk voices in the computers endlessly fascinating. This is probably what started my obsession with Kraftwerk around that age. Vocoders and speech synthesis amazed and terrified me in equal measure, though as I got older the latter feeling subsided. Fitting, then, is the picture of a deep sea hatchetfish, another thing which I initially feared and then later began to obsess over.

In fact, around 5th grade I made an account on MIT’s “Scratch” website as “hatchetfishbobsteve”. Scratch culture, while it lasted, was interesting. The program was written for children as young as 5 to learn programming, but most of the users were in their early teens. It existed at an intersection of demoscene and deviantArt that I’m not sure anything else existed at, though I suppose Eric W. Schwartz’s equal notoriety in the Amiga and furry communities comes close. In fact Scratch’s (somewhat watered-down) “anthro” circles were perhaps the first time I felt comfortable interacting with furries, and I even made a pine marten character who I never really ended up using. Mostly because the best name I could think up for him was “Martin Pine”.

The Scratch community eventually imploded because the deviantArt “donut steel” mentality conflicted with Scratch’s open-source nature and encouragement of “remixing”. On top of that, the decision for MIT to change Scratch’s format from Java-based to Flash, and the linked decision to abandon the standalone editor for a Flash in-browser one, thus making the program run even more slowly than it had previously, caused a number of users (well...me, mostly because I made a lot of programs involving MIDI implementation) to abandon the site. But for one brief, fleeting moment...we honestly had something pretty cool.

[seanmarx69]

6 tips for teaching kids to code

From opensource.com by Al Sweigart URL: http://opensource.com/life/15/6/6-tips-teaching-kids-code Image by : opensource.com Programming is a creative activity that any kid can engage in. Your child might not care about writing data processing algorithms, but they might enjoy creating games, programming music, designing websites, or just playing around with code. I’ve written several books to…

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[rosethyme]

if you wanna start learning to code like the kids do these days

Scratch is a free website from MIT that is kid-oriented but appropriate for all ages. Also, when you make your account you can choose male, female, or fill-in-the-blank for gender.  Your gender is not displayed anywhere after that, they just ask for statistics & research reasons. You can't change your gender later.