Scratch A tool to schedule a question and answer game
If you don’t have any programming skills, but still want to get a handle on the subject a bit, you can consider the Scratch tool, specially designed for computer language beginners. With it you can create various programs, but one of the simplest and most fun can be a game of questions and answers.
Scratch, the programming language for children
Scratch is a visual programming language that was developed at the MIT Media Lab by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group and is designed to be easy to use to introduce programming, especially to children.
It offers a friendly interface for children, as well as color indicators so that they can identify the function of each of the boxes, through which they can determine the actions that the program they will create will carry out.
Currently, Scratch is used in primary and secondary educational classrooms to teach the basics of programming and encourage the interest of young people in the subject, which is in high demand today due to the automation of digital processes.
Creating a question and answer game with Scratch
One of the most useful uses that you could give to Scratch is to make a simple, but fun question and answer game, since it is one of the easiest tasks that you can do with this programming language.
And since you have complete freedom to edit the information, if you put the necessary effort into it and carry out the proper research, you could create one of the best quiz games to entertain yourself and your friends, family or students.
To begin, it is best to have prepared the questions in advance. In this situation, it is very practical to choose different categories in order to obtain varied topics and questions that are not repeated too much, increasing the practicality of the game and offering varied and fun games.
To prepare the questions, we advise you to choose topics that are of interest to you or your students in case you are going to create the program for educational purposes. At the same time, this task can also be carried out in teams, which encourages research and knowledge of the general culture of all participants.
When you have the questions ready, it’s time to use Scratch to program your game. The first thing you should do is have everything you need installed on your computer to avoid problems when running it.
Start by opening the Scratch language window and identify the boxes you’ll need to fill in to create a new program. Since Scratch works with modular groups, in them you must fill in the boxes of the “Sensors” category, which is light blue, with the instructions “Ask”, “Wait” and “Answer”
When running this model, you will be able to enter the question and the selected answer to save it. This last block, where the answer is found, works as a variable, so the information placed in that box as an answer will have different results, thus providing the basis of the game.
Now, you can create the variable module, where you can place phrases such as “Correct” or “Incorrect” depending on the response previously programmed within the code.
To continue adding questions and increasing the scope of your game, you just have to continue creating modules and filling in the information to be able to prepare what is necessary for the execution of the program on the computer.
Using the scoring system in Scratch
Since a question and answer game should have a method to obtain a winner, in this case we will use one of the most classic and used in all kinds of board games: a score board.
To create this module you must click on the orange “Data” button in the Scratch program. This will create a new variable module that you should call “Score” to avoid confusion. You must add it to the answer module, where you can choose how many points to award for a correct answer or also remove in case the participant makes a mistake.
Another advantage that you can take advantage of to improve the score and performance of the game when running it in Scratch is to determine the variant of answers, for example, when a question is asked that can be answered in different ways. You can do this by specifying the green button called “Operators” in the editing module, through which you could also add the possibility of multiple answers to the same question.
Running the game
When you already have all the modules programmed correctly with the necessary information for the questions, answers and punctuation, you will be able to execute it within the same system of the Scratch language.
The interface should look pretty simple showing a single bar for typing the answer to the question that will pop up at the top of the screen. If correct, the program will display the “Correct” result along with the score awarded for the answer. If not, the “Incorrect” message should appear and the previously determined sanction if desired.
Finally, you must not forget to set the variable to zero before the start of each game, by clicking on the green flag of the main module so that the score table can be carried out in real time and without problems.
Conclusions
As you can see, Scratch is a very useful tool to get started with programming, since it offers you the basic methods to create an infinite number of programs, which can range from simple games to complex calculation and visual demonstration systems.
These details make Scratch a striking alternative to introduce children and young people to programming, since it is considered that in the near future it could even become a basic subject to be studied in classrooms around the world, due to the global digitization of all types of operations.
Therefore, if you don’t know anything about the subject yet, but you are interested, we advise you to do some research on this language that could help you take your first steps in the world of programming.
