Student Question about Running Game Lab code in other coding platforms

CS Discoveries Coding and Debugging Help
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Hello,
I am new to coding and teaching Computer Science Discoveries this year. One of my middle school students asked the following question and I am not sure how to respond. Can you help? See their message below:

"I am trying to run my interactive greeting card OUTSIDE of code/org. It is very confusing for many reasons.

  1. Am I making code in JAVA or JAVASCRIPT? they are different languages.
  2. When I try to run the code somewhere else, it has a series of errors, including: it doesn’t know what ‘World’ is… must be a package that code.org imports for you… how can I import it?
    It also has the output draw screen package… how do I import that? So while this code/org project is very interesting and helpful, I think it’s kinda lame that code.org is telling you how to program Java… on code/org. If I become a computer scientist, I am probably not going to be programming on code/org. I’m wondering if you can help a bit, If you can’t, that’s okay. It’s just that I want to be able to use these skills somewhere else also."
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“Game Lab is a browser-based JavaScript programming environment designed to create sprite-based drawings, animations and games, with the ability to freely switch between programming in blocks or text.” It is intended to be an educational tool. Because it is a JavaScript based tool, the skills learned such as conditional statements, loops, variables, functions, etc., will be transferable to learning many other languages. Because it is an educational tool, the exact projects you build in Game Lab may not be transferable to running somewhere else. This is especially due to the sprite library that are housed in Game Lab.

Have your student search on the forum. It sounds like he wants to grow his learning beyond the scope of the curriculum (which is great!!). There are some posts that can help him take the leap - such as this one. Good luck!
Michelle

2 Likes
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@omlewis
There are things called embed that allows you to include embed as iframe in an html.
Take a look at this one:
https://jsfiddle.net/b0urxwk3/
If the student plans on developing outside of code.org, I personally do not suggest using p5,js. There are probably other libraries, and even then, it would be better to develop things as an application like unity.