New command ideas

[MarleenGilsing]

Here are some commands I think would be nice to have in Hedy:

- Wait/sleep
I think that's already in the works. Maybe we can also make a timer, or create an adventure on how to make a timer that can be used in a game.

- Clear screen
It would be great if there could be a command that would empty the output screen, especially for games and stories.

- Showing a variable value in the screen
It would be nice if we could add a value counter to the output screen that would be constantly updated. For example if you make the multiplication game in level 6/7 that it would keep track of your score live. Or if you'd make the story adventure that you could see the items your carrying. So you could see: 'bag: rope, sword'. It would have to be a seperate bar at the top or bottom of the screen that could show a variable's value.
This doesn't only contribute to the fun of playing a game, but it might also help in the understanding of variables. When students can see live what's 'saved in the variable' they might understand it better.
I think the command could be 'show'. This could be incorporated in level 2.

• Having the option to make the input and output screen full screen (and being able to only share the fullscreen output)
  This is not a new command, but I think it would be great if Hedy could do this. Especially for students who work on small devices it would be nice to be able to make the coding screen bigger and run the code without always seeing it.
  This way students can share their work with eachother without the receiver being able to easily win/cheat on their games by looking at the code. The secret passcodes would stay secret.

- Adding colours to Hedy
Colours could make it more appealing for the students. For example change the colour of the text in a conversation so you know who's talking. Or change the backdrop colour of the output screen when you walk into a different room in the story.

Maybe something like:

print red 'this text is red'
print blue 'this text is blue'

or

text is red
print 'this text is red'
text is blue
print 'this text is blue'

Or:
if room is forest
backdrop is green
if room is house
backdrop is black

To really appeal to children, we could even add a rainbow setting and make the letters a different colour each.
We could also explore the possibility to use numbers instead of the words 'red' or 'blue'. That would make it easier to translate, and it could give you options to change the colour effect (like you can so in scratch), but it's harder to understand as it's not natural to say.

- These are some changes for the turtle option:
We could also give the turtle colour, or maybe add a second turtle with another colour. I think the option to lift up the pen would also be a nice addition to the turtle.

- Wait until/repeat until
Scratch has the commands wait until and repeat until. I'm not sure if that would even work in Hedy, as you only make one code and not several scripts like in scratch. But maybe we could add something like that.
Edit: I think this already exists in level 17 with the while command

Example:
wait until points is 5
print ‘Winner!’

- Multiple choice options for the ask command
Not really neccesary but it could come in handy. If you make a choose-your-own-adventure-story in Hedy and you ask the player what they want to do next, they can basically only answer with one word. For example:

place is ask 'Would you like to go to the forest or to the castle?'
if answer is forest ....
if answer is castle .....

If the player types 'the castle' or 'I'd like to go to the castle' the game crashes. A multiple choice option would prevent that. But we would have to think of a way to make it easy to add the multiple choice options, and turn it into clickable buttons.

- Making an easier option for 'price is price + 1'
For some students this is hard to understand. Maybe we could program Hedy to allow 'price is +1' as well.

Example
if food is pizza
price is +1

[MarleenGilsing]

add to list
It would be nice to be able to add an answer of an ask to a list. We have talked about this during the summercamp, so it might already exist. If it does we could add a level introducing it (along with the if in list), if not we could make it!

For example:
names is Marleen, Felienne
yourname is ask 'What is your name?'
add yourname to names

And with add obviously remove goes along with it.