Program Structure

If you think of a program as a list of instructions for a computer to perform, then you might also wonder how one tells the computer where to begin. The answer here depends on what type of program you are writing, and there are very many ways to program a computer.

Just to give you a sense of the possibilities, let's look at some of the details of Arduino, PICO-8, Linux and Scratch programs. We have what we need to write all of these types of programs in our club, and each system has its own advantages and disadvantages.

Since many students have experience with Scratch, let's start there. Scratch programming is based on giving sprites (like the cat) something to do. Each sprite can have a set of scripts associated with it, and each script starts with an event. For example, many scripts start when the green flag is clicked, and the first block in a sprite script is often this one.