Category names and order

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SimpleSi
Posts: 330
Joined: Jul 2nd, '17, 13:47

Category names and order

Post by SimpleSi » Aug 24th, '17, 19:48

When working on my Training Wheels for Scratchers mod, I was thinking about the GP categories

In Scratch, there is no Words category - any word ops are within Operators

Obviously GP has a lot more maths and word blocks but since the Operators category just contains maths functions then I'd like to suggest that its changed to Maths as that describes the functions within it more precisely

Data can be used for any function that is ambigious as Data is quite an ambiguous word

And change order of categories to be
...
Maths
Words
Data
Variables
...

MSandro
Posts: 162
Joined: Jul 26th, '17, 21:12

Re: Category names and order

Post by MSandro » Aug 26th, '17, 11:59

Good idea, and maybe "Words" should be changed to "Strings" because it is containing many string manipulation blocks and not only some for words.

JohnM
Posts: 379
Joined: Sep 11th, '15, 14:42

Re: Category names and order

Post by JohnM » Sep 20th, '17, 19:42

I think changing "Words" -> "Strings" makes sense. I'm not sure sure about "Operators" -> "Maths", since that category contains boolean operations and a few other things like "isNil" (in Dev mode).

To avoid introducing confusion, especially for teachers just getting started with GP, I'd like to keep the category names the same through at least December. If and when we do change the categories, it would be good to make several changes at the same time and then not change them again for a while (additions are okay).

Meanwhile, it's great to get your thoughts on the category names.

Here's one set question: The Data category currently mixes commands for lists and dictionaries. I've thought about splitting that category into "List" and "Dictionary", but the "Dictionary" category would just repeat about a dozen of the list blocks. For example, "count", "add", and "is _ empty?" apply to both. I think there are advantages to emphasizing the similarities between lists and dictionaries but, of course, there is also potential for confusion. In fact, I'm guessing many beginners won't know what a dictionary is or what it's good for. (Dictionaries map keys, usually strings, to values. This allows them to store named properties, like Javascript objects or C structures. They can also be used to count the number of times the same value occurs: for example, you could use a dictionary to find out how many unique words are in a piece of text, and how many times each word appears.) From that standpoint, it might be good to make a separate category for dictionary to call it to people's attention.

Anyway, let's keep talking about what category names and groupings make the most sense, especially to beginners.

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