Ciao a tutti :) (Hello, Everyone in Italian)

I hope everyone had happy holidays! Since the last time I posted, I mentioned I would share the list of commone words from Scratch Jr. and App Inventor! The list is quite the size, but the most commonalities I saw were between the math and control blocks. In addition, over the break my group mates and I were responsible to do our graphics, block appearance, and look at implementing the functionality of the block we designed.

I will first discuss the block appearance and the implementation of that block. I believe I shared before that designing the appearence of the block was quite challenging. This is because I had to choose the words to represent the block carefully and it looks similar to those of other block languages. For now, I will leave it as is but I am still brainstorming ways I can make it better. Implementing the functionality is also quite interesting and we are still trying to figure this part out. Mostly, my question is how to pair the code that makes the block function with its block. Our faculty adivsor is currently helping up overcome this obstacle and we are really pushing for this to be resolved within the next two weeks or so.

Now as for graphics, this was very fun to figure out and code! I knew that our graphics had to be done with JavaScript but I was not sure on the details of how. After some help from my dear friend Google, I decided to use the HTML5 Canvas.

The HTML5 Canvas is used to draw graphics on a web page. The canvas element is only the container for the graphics. And to actually draw the graphics, you have to use JavaScript. Using the HTML, the canvas element, CSS, and JavaScript I was able to create some basic graphics for Hopper’s Fables!

http://www.w3schools.com/html/html5_canvas.asp