Programming Scratcher and the Unicorn Wizard Forest Party

The coding continues… this is strange.

At it’s core, programming is the discipline of logical, procedural thinking. If that’s the case, what on earth is the above game doing here?

It’s easy to get caught up with the way we write code. Often the whole structure is broken if we miss a single comma in a 20-line text file. That makes it more difficult as error messages are often more common than actually making progress in a real program.

Scratch is a simple programming language which empowers users to write computer programs without being code monkeys. There is very little typing. To create a game like this, we just drag and drop.

The benefit to coding is that the logical thinking is still a part of the process. You can learn to create using if/then statements but you won’t get jammed up for a missed comma. One learns the data structures without getting stopped by the reality of proper syntax.

To create the music I deconstructed a YouTube tutorial teaching us the Indiana Jones theme track. It was interesting learning a song through beats per minute and rest times. I found myself revisiting lessons learned from traditional sheet music to solve some of the issues with 1/8 notes and 1/16 notes. This is another example of how breaking down ideas so that a computer can repeat those ideas, empowers the creator to understand the actual thing at a deeper level.

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