Special programming topics in Scratch

The majority of algorithms existent in the present book have been selected from the syllabus examined in the Panhellenic Exams for the ‘Developing applications in a programming environment’ school subject of the final school grade. Moreover, the aforementioned syllabus is adjusted to the particular
features of the Scratch environment. What follows is the step-by-step verbaldescription of the complete functionality of the system and the resulting escription of the actions to be performed by each object of the program. This will eventually be transformed into Scratch code.

The problems were of a complex nature and this resulted inevitably in complex code. The need to not only handle but also teach to our students the complexity of composite problems led to the invention of ‘CodOrama’ (from the Greek words Κώδιξ/ Code and Όραμα/Orama). This need could be defined through the overall perception of the code’s totality on the one hand and, at the same time, the focusing on the significant details of the different modules that comprise the objects in different states, on the other hand. 

‘CodOrama’is a two-dimensional table. On one dimension there are the objects of the system and on the other the states where the objects can be found during the execution of the system. On the thus defined surface, cells are created that contain the visualized code determining the behavior of the correspondingobjects in the corresponding states. Communication is performed via ariables and messages providing the ability for interaction between code modules of one object with code modules of another object. The supervision offered by ‘CodOrama’ enables the student to distinguish the code modules that are performed sequentially from those performed in a parallel way..

The book is written by a team of  IT teachers to be used as the basic material for teaching coding with Scratch in Ellinogermaniki Agogi, a greek private school, located in Pallini, Athens, Greece