As promised from last week's post, click here to see an example of how you can bring animation from Alice into Scratch to create stop gap 3D animation in a Scratch 2D editor.

I've spent this week getting acquainted with the new Scratch 2.0 and very happy with the way it allows you to copy sprites with their code between different Scratch projects, and how 2.0 allows you to create global, not just local variables. Now, when you go to create a variable (2.0 renamed the "variable" control to "data" in the block editor), the pop-up will give you a check box option "cloud variable (stored on server)". It defaults to "unchecked". If you check this option, this means that the variable you are creating for your current project will also become a variable option for a future project. For example, I have a recipe for a custom "timer" variable that I like to teach kids and want to have a standard sprite that contains this recipe that can be used project to project. In version 1.4, since you couldn't copy sprites project to project, you were left "exporting" a sprite, which would bring over it's animation so you could use in a new project if you selected the newly exported sprite from the character options. If the sprite's animation included a "variable" and calls to it within the programming, version 1.4 would bring it all over, and add the variable with this exported sprite to the new project once you selected it, but the variable was non-functional, which you could fix only by deleting and re-creating the variable. I did find, however, that while 2.0 will copy over variables project to project if you check "cloud variable", in the new project, you have to navigate to the "data" section and check the variable itself so that it become visible in the scene editor (for example, variables like "score" and "timer"). Variables as a concept are tricky enough for new programmers, so I'm glad to see that version 2.0 handles variables more logically.

Other minor things I've found testing between version 1.4 and 2.0:

*2.0 seems to open projects created in 1.4 without any problems
*You can still drag and drop programming from one sprite to another within a project, the difference in 2.0 that you don't get the highlight box over the sprite you're copying to confirming it's ok to drop the code, which I found to be a little confusing (be sure to check the sprite you're copying to to make sure the code is there as expected)
*In 2.0, when you create a new sprite in the drawing editor, Scratch auto saves your work, so you only have to navigate to the "script" tab once you're done (it's now available in the same view as the drawing editor). There's no "save" button to click. In version 1.4, once opened, you'd only see the drawing editor that you'd have to close before you could "script" the new sprite you'd created.

All in all, good progress, 2.0! While still identified as "beta", I'd recommend using it over 1.4 and will teach using 2.0 from here forward.