Hola a todos :)

If you guys remember our group made a rubric for our block programming language, in which we would use later on to evaluate it against other block programming languages! That time has come and this week I evaluated Scratch Jr. and MIT App Inventor with our rubric! Based on my evaluation using our rubric, Scratch Jr. had a higher score than of MIT App Inventor. Scratch Jr.’s block terms language/vocabulary match the intended user and its simplicity made it very easy to understand. In additon, the aesthetics were simple, clean, and consistent, which I found very helpful seeing as younger childeren primarly use Scratch Jr..

One of the characteristics MIT App Inventor did well on against our rubric allowing users to easily share their project in a variety of formats and manners. Overall, Scratch Jr. and MIT App Inventor scored well against our rubric and it helped me see something interesting. What I discorved is I personally enjoyed Scratch Jr. because of how the alignment of the blocks fit, horizontally. Where as with MIT App Inventor and most block programming languges, their block alignment is vertically, as how actual lines of code would look like. The reason is because reading and placing the blocks horizontally made it more readable to me, though I find the other way readable as well.

In additon to evaluating the exsisitng block programming languages, I also have started building out a basic template of where our game will be. This was quite tricky to do because of div tags and its relatives. What I mean by relatives are html things called wrapper and class, I understand them kind of but it is still something I have to look more into! Using the wrapper and the class will make the template code shorter because right now there are a whole lot of div’s! Who knew just building a basic template was harder than it sounds!

Though the struggles, I learned that in place of many of the divs in my code, using a class and wrapper will most likely significantly reduce the amount of div tags I use! In addition I learned some different techniques to use in CSS, for example at first I was writting both the HTML and CSS in an “old fashioned way”, and have learned the new way (or perhaps easier way) web developers program! For instance, I am using IntelliJ IDEA the Java IDE - JetBrains and using this IDE allows me to visually what colors I want in the CSS file instead of using #FFFF00.

This coming week, I plan to actually make the activities worksheets for our case study of block terminology, continue the development of our games basic layout, and also prepare for our SIGCSE Conference trip coming up in about 2 weeks! We are preparing our poster and are very excited to showcase our hard work :)