Experience With Programming Languages

Programming Languages

 

i.                Describe your experience building a program using scratch

a.      Scratch was very interesting and fun. At first glance it was difficult to navigate through the menu. Once I started watching the tutorial videos I understood all of the functions that existed when creating a program, including “motion”, “looks”, “sound”, “events”, “control” and “sensing” that helped make the program come to life. The objective that I wanted within the creation of this program was to conjure up a juvenile game that was fun and interactive. Here is the following URL to the program that was created: INT 100 Project on Scratch (mit.edu).

ii.              Identify the difficulties that you encountered in Scratch

a.      Some of the issues I ran into when using scratch was the navigation around the website and finding out the tools to help create the program. It was also difficult finding some of the tutorial videos. The types of codes were layed out clearly but some of the codes were difficult to understand, I had to rewatch some of the tutorials to fully understand them.

iii.             Explain how you overcame the difficulties

a.      In order to overcome the difficulties in navigating the website I rewatched the tutorial videos. I also went to the supplemental sites that were mentioned in the prompt including “Alice” and “Code Combat”. Once I did both I started constructing the blocks of coding, trying each function to become more familiar with it.

iv.             Describe the insights that you gained about programming from this exercise

a.      Learning what each block of code could do taught me the functionality. For example when creating and choosing the “sprite” character for my program I learned that some of the blocks of code can manipulate the appearance of the sprite including what color it was and what it did in relation to movement, making noises or saying phrases.

v.               Compare your experience programming in Scratch with the participation activities in Sections 2.8, 2.9, 2.10, and 2.11 of the textbook that explored machine language, assembly language and high-level languages such as Python and describe the differences between the programming languages.     

a.      As mentioned in our text by Vahid & Lysecky (2017), “just like a chef executes a recipe’s instructions, a CPU executes a programs instructions in 0’s and 1’s (Section 2.8). While using Scratch and the programming blocks to build code, it reminded me of how the CPU interprets that code to execute commands by using machine language which is converted by the assembler. Assembly language uses textual representation so that humans can understand it, then an assembler converts the language to machine learning to be understood and executed by the CPU (Section 2.9). Lastly Python is a high-level language that is one of the most popular high-level languages to learn and is freely available (Section 2.11).

vi.             Identify which language you found the easiest to use

a.      In my opinion from the lessons in the text it seems like the assembly language was the most easiest to learn. I have not learned how to use Python language. At first glance when reading the text it was a bit confusing to learn initially.

vii.           Describe scenarios where each type of programming language would be most effective

a.      The binary language is used by the CPU only, the assembly language is a low-level programming language that humans can read and is commonly used in DOS. High-level languages such as Python are most commonly used in websites, images, etc.

viii.         Explain which programming language you think is the most important

a.      The language I think is the most important would be the python language. This is not only one of the most popular languages in coding that is most used in creaing applications, websites and images and is widely found.

Reference

Vahid, F., & Lysecky, S. (2017). Computing technology for all. Retrieved from zybooks.zyante.com/