What's New in Scratch 2.0
scratch.mit.edu
scratch.mit.edu
I'm looking at an empty beer bottle and a nutrigrain wrapper.
Megaman could apparently only shoot N bullets at once (3 or 5, I forget). Thus, they only ever had 5 bullet objects, iterated through a list to see if the bullet was shot or not, and only let you fire if there was a spare bullet.
I thought it was very clever. Sounds like you did much of the same thing.
https://www.evernote.com/shard/s4/sh/90b814fd-df52-4fcf-9127...
That said, one downside of Scratch 2.0 (at least in my view) is the migration to a Flash based editor/playback engine. And I don't entirely blame MIT for this, because Scratch 2.0 has been under development for quite a long time. Five years ago, Flash maybe seemed more appropriate than it is now.
Although the content-creation tool sadly remains in Flash.
We used the scratch programming for teens [1] book.
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For the book, you can still download 1.4:
http://info.scratch.mit.edu/scratch_1.4_download
And all the games should still work in the new 2.0 interface too; it's an overhaul of the development environment, with backwards compatibility. (I'm updating the book now for 2.0, I edited it.)
Some great new authors working on those, and not just Scratch too, but some "real languages".
But sadly, the 2nd edition of Super Scratch will probably just be an update to stay relevant, not an overhaul.
I hope that Edmond, the author of that first edition, will write a second book, but that depends on his time. You can check out some of his other Scratch projects here: http://scratch.mit.edu/users/LEAD/
I don't have a CS class this year, so I haven't set aside enough time to dig into the latest versions of Snap or Scratch. If anyone has any insight to share, it'd be greatly appreciated.
Like you say, Snap's main difference is it makes some more advanced CS concepts more overt, primarily for use as a teaching tool for older students. To this end, it doesn't have the deep social integration that Scratch does: remixing and sharing are a big part of Scratch.
But that isn't to say that Scratch isn't suitable for high school or college level courses - Harvard's been using Scratch in the first week of it's intro CS class for several years now, with great success. The advantage of Snap is that transitioning from it to pure coding can be less of a leap, due to support for things like recursion, procedures, and continuations.
The Lifelong Kindergarten's remit at MIT means that they tend to place emphasis on a certain age range. In addition to Snap there's also an offshoot of Scratch targeted at very young children (Scratch Jr, which I think is developed by Tufts).
Coupled with the Flash front end, that doesn't make me hugely happy.
Introducing too early seems to have a downside that if my son does not like it (or cannot grasp it), he develops a negative feeling towards it like boredom or else, and then subconsciously does not want to return to it even at the right age.
(Note that we mix kids, with ages ranging from 5 to 14, and always a 50/50 ratio of girls/boys, not via quota but because of the way the events are planned. So we also have older kids. It's good for the younger ones.)
At this age, they (usually) don't read, so they generally are working with an adult and another kid, or in some instance with an older kid (my just 6 years old daughter for example worked one of the firs times with an older girl that knew Scratch.)
A very important thing to do is to let the creative direction to the kids. Don't force the programming of a shooter on them. They have lot of ideas, and they will be more motivated if the idea come from them. Also they will be proud to see it happen. They'll want to move things, animate, etc. They'll want to copy things they have seen. Letting them draw on paper, for example a character, then taking a picture and incorporating it in Scratch is a nice way to alternate between two different activities (solving the "will they focus for long?" question)
If you want to know more: http://codinggouter.org and my talk at FOSDEM: https://fosdem.org/2013/schedule/event/coding_gouter/ may be helpful