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Hello England
Posted: Wed Oct 26, 2022 10:12 am
by richmond62
There is a 'mag' pumped out by the Raspberry Pi foundation (had 2 'things' published in it a while ago)
aimed at English Primary School teachers (and which, if one turns one's filters on, can yield some useful things)
and their latest offering is this:
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https://helloworld.raspberrypi.org/book ... ng_content
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Which is available as a free download . . .
and, on page 71 there is this:
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which is about as basic as things get (and, as such, might not be a bad idea to start things off with).
So, here's a
blank as I would set it up for the 8-11 year old brigade:
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and I wish you all you wish yourself . . .
My "cut" will follow later.
Re: Hello England
Posted: Wed Oct 26, 2022 12:30 pm
by richmond62
One of the things that 'ticks me off' about this is that I feel that
children will rapidly lose interest as both the movements of the 'falling stars'
and the 'basket' are
random, so there is no
game involved and no
skill.
So, I would modify things a bit:
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Re: Hello England
Posted: Wed Oct 26, 2022 12:55 pm
by SparkOut
"If the start falls into the bowl"
Re: Hello England
Posted: Wed Oct 26, 2022 1:02 pm
by richmond62
"If the start falls into the bowl"
Ha, Ha, ha: you made my day by pointing out my mistake.
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Re: Hello England
Posted: Wed Oct 26, 2022 2:39 pm
by SparkOut
Oh! I wasn't picking at you, I thought this was a snippet from the publication that got past proofreaders.
Re: Hello England
Posted: Wed Oct 26, 2022 2:47 pm
by richmond62
The first step is to set up potential positions the 'star' (here it is a sweetie) can drop from.
AS the stack is 1000 points wide we can set up potential start positions at intervals of 50 points across
the top of the stack, BUT we do NOT want the sweetie dropping at either edge of the stack.
So we need to slice up the stack into equal slices of 50 points:
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To address these positions we need to have a random number somewhere between 1 and 19 and then do this:
Code: Select all
put random(18) into RX
put RX * 50 into POZ
then we can use POZ as the horizontal position of our sweetie.
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In our finished game we will make sure the sweetie's starting position is above the top of the stack window so it is not initially visible.
Code: Select all
on mouseUp
put random(18) into RX
put RX * 50 into POZ
set the location of image "sweetie" to POZ, -100
end mouseUp
Re: Hello England
Posted: Wed Oct 26, 2022 3:08 pm
by richmond62
I have now removed those 19 lines that I put there just to show where the 'slices' are to be.
Now we can work on the script that will make the sweetie fall out of the sky:
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the line:
is there so there are intervals in which the bowl can be moved.
Re: Hello England
Posted: Wed Oct 26, 2022 3:10 pm
by richmond62
Oh! I wasn't picking at you
Well, that's a pity, because with a simple mistake like that I deserved to be picked on.
Re: Hello England
Posted: Wed Oct 26, 2022 3:21 pm
by richmond62
Now we can work on the script that can shift the
bowl left and right in an attempt to catch the falling
sweetie.
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- arrow-keys.png (20.24 KiB) Viewed 5403 times
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We will use the RIGHT and the LEFT arrow keys on our keyboards to make the bowl move.
in LiveCode we can detect if the LEFT arrow key has been pressed with:
and, if the RIGHT arrow key has been pressed with:
Re: Hello England
Posted: Wed Oct 26, 2022 3:33 pm
by richmond62
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You will see that we ask if an arrow key has been pressed once, and then we ask if it is the LEFT or the RIGHT key:
Code: Select all
on arrowKey AK
if AK is "right" then
put item 1 of the location of image "bowl" into LR
put item 2 of the location of image "bowl" into UD
set the location of image "bowl" to (LR + 25), UD
else
put item 1 of the location of image "bowl" into LR
put item 2 of the location of image "bowl" into UD
set the location of image "bowl" to (LR - 25), UD
end if
end arrowKey
The script is saved in the cardScript as we want to detect if an arrow key is pressed even if the START button is not pressed.
Re: Hello England
Posted: Wed Oct 26, 2022 5:41 pm
by richmond62
Now we need to learn about intersect . . .
Re: Hello England
Posted: Thu Oct 27, 2022 8:19 am
by richmond62
It is NOT a bad idea to STOP the bowl going away at either the left or the right edge of the stack window:
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Code: Select all
on arrowKey AK
if AK is "right" then
put item 1 of the location of image "bowl" into LR
put item 2 of the location of image "bowl" into UD
if (LR + 25) < 1000 then
set the location of image "bowl" to (LR + 25), UD
end if
else
put item 1 of the location of image "bowl" into LR
put item 2 of the location of image "bowl" into UD
if (LR - 25) > 0 then
set the location of image "bowl" to (LR - 25), UD
end if
end if
end arrowKey
Re: Hello England
Posted: Thu Oct 27, 2022 11:24 am
by richmond62
We must be careful to insert
with messages after our wait command so the computer will pick up our arrow keys presses during the animation loop for the sweetie:
Code: Select all
on mouseUp
put random(18) into RX
put RX * 50 into POZ
set the location of image "sweetie" to POZ, -100
put 5 into XXX
repeat until XXX > 860
put item 2 of the loc of image "sweetie" into UD
add 10 to UD
add 10 to XXX
set the location of image "sweetie" to POZ, UD
wait 2 ticks with messages
end repeat
if intersect(image "sweetie", image "bowl", 5) then
add 3 to field "fSCORE"
set the visible of image "WD" to true
wait 30 ticks
set the visible of image "WD" to false
send "mouseUp" to button "START"
else
set the visible of image "GO" to true
end if
set the location of image "sweetie" to POZ, -100
end mouseUp
you will see how
intersect comes into play to check whether the sweetie is ending up 'in' the owl.
Re: Hello England
Posted: Thu Oct 27, 2022 11:30 am
by richmond62
As LiveCode is WYSIWYG it is always handy to have a tester around to try out your game,
and tell you what's wrong with it:
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My tester suggested some visual feedback, so we popped 2 images together almost 100% inwith LiveCode:
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Re: Hello England
Posted: Thu Oct 27, 2022 11:40 am
by richmond62
My tester told me that, because the bowl and the sweetie were too large, the game was too easy,
so we resized both of them to half of their original sizes:
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The article cited states:
"It can sometimes be difficult to distinguish between the levels of coding/building and running the project,
as learners should be repeatedly cycling through coding and running, to check that their program is working."
LiveCode lends itself particularly well to
cycling through coding and running.