We are considering using Scratch in 2nd grade through high school. Currently we teach Visual Basic to all high schoolers as part of an integrated Math/Science/Technology curriculum. The major drawback to using Scratch in the upper grades is the lack of some of the high school math functions. Do other feel the lack? I assume it that they would be easy add-ons.
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See my RPN calculator for trig functions and sqrt.
http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/kevin_karplus/2164
It *would* be a lot faster (and the functions could be used in games) if the functions were built in.
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I compute the sine and cosine in my mathlib project. I use the Taylor polynomial to approximate the value. It's a very accurate method but Scratch cuts the value down to one decimal place. Kevin's calculator moves a sprite to the angle you want to use, travels 1 unit and then gives the x for cos and y for sin, effectively going to a coordinate on the unit circle. I thought that was a really cool method of doing it. However, I would suggest having high schoolers create their own math functions.
http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/jimmit/8200
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Actually, scratch computes to (reasonably) high precision, it just doesn't display to high precision. (It also has extremely buggy display of very large numbers.)
You could use something like my print_decimal routine to print the numbers actually computed:
http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/kevin_karplus/2951
Using the sprites to get atan does have limited accuracy on the squeak implementation, which foolishly rounds direction.
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