I’ve been noticing interesting uses, or misuses, of Scratch’s ‘forever’ block. I applaud Scratch for it’s fail soft policy and understanding the desire of 10 year olds to test things, especially to their limits.
The ‘forever’ block seems pretty self-explanatory and perhaps that means I don’t introduce it properly. My students tend to use it in 3 ways: repeating actions, for event listeners and for looping background music.
I introduce the forever block after introducing the repeat block. Once they know about it, there is no going back!
In many games you wait for a certain action to happen to respond to it. One way to do that is to code some ‘if statements’ and set them in a forever loop, like an event listener in other coding languages.
Many, many students want use it for play background music for their games.
Two dance tracks in a forever loop. Both seem to work, together.
And I think it is with the ‘play sound’ block where things gets confusing. I am a proponent of ‘play sound until done’ in a forever loop, and the Scratch Wiki concurs, but it seems to work without the ‘until done’ if it is the only thing in the forever loop.
Other things I’ve seen makes me wonder. Why did the Scratcher feel the need to use the forever block? Was some other code interfering with their action?
What would cause the need for show in a forever loop?
Or are they just testing things to see what works and what fails.
Forever and ever and ever and ever, just in case repeating 10 to the power of 109 times isn’t enough!
Thanks Scratch for not failing them.