Helping to Clarify Differences Between New Collision Blocks

CS Discoveries Unit and Lesson Discussion
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I just wanna throw out that, even after following along with this lesson in Code Studio and doing the lessons on my own, I was still unclear about the differences between the 4 new types of collision blocks: displace, collide, bounce, and bouceOff. In particular, in Stage 6, I couldn’t tell what made collide() and displace() different other than switching which sprite “pushes” the other target…

I happened to click on the Code.org documentation for the collide() block and saw they had a nifty app that shows all 4 types of collisions with static targets: https://studio.code.org/projects/gamelab/FJM4fS9Zb9pj2Qc8dmK2Fw/ . This was way more helpful for me in clarifying how the blocks work rather than reading the descriptions on stage 7.

So, if anyone else has students who are still confused about how the blocks work, you might show them that app. Or, if any Code.org folks happen to see this, it would be really nice if that app showed up in one of those roadmap text-only summary stages between Stages 6 and 7 (but that’s just my 2 cents).

4 Likes
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Dschneider,

The documentation is always a great resource that I end up showing students very early in Unit 3 so they can be “leaders of their own learning”. Great tip with the collide() examples!

Brad

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@dschneider

As a side note, you are correct that the collide and displace block are only different that they switch which sprite is pushing which. We’re planning to add more explicit instruction to the different types of collisions as we revise the unit for the next year, and I’ll log your feedback that you’d like visual examples of the different types. Thank you for the feedback and suggestion.

Best,
Elizabeth