A ’scratchy’ beginning
I took on writing a Scratch application as my immersion task for Elective ‘E’. To avoid starting from ’scratch’ (is that where the name comes from?) I loaded an existing Maths project (solving quadratic equations) from the collaborative web site and improved it by changing the interface and adding a graph of the parabolic curve.
My fairly modest effort can be found here.
It may be interesting to recount how my efforts went. I am an experienced programmer so it didn’t take long to pick up the basics of how the coding was done and how events were handled in Scratch. The biggest difficulty I had was understanding how the ’sprites’ interacted with the ’stage’. From there things went fairly smoothly. Say about 2 hours all up. Putting in all the changes and additions I wanted took probably about another 8 hours. I would say 90% of that was fiddling with the GUI aspects of the application and the effects I wanted. Only about 10% of the time was actual coding.
Since this was a Maths application, is this something I would give to a Mathematics class? Definitely not, as there is too much superfluous activity and very little in the way of actual learning about mathematics. However, I would certainly consider it (or something similar) for an IST class.
