The 2DIY Script Archive

2DIY and the New Computing Curriculum

With the changes to ICT that were announced, and are designed to come into being for September 2014, maybe it's time to take another look at 2DIY and see how it could be used in your school...

The ability to create a simple activity through drag and drop features, and then dig deeper with more advanced coding options means it's great for the new Computing Curriculum.

There are some great tutorials about using code within activities already on this site, and we're developing a 6 week block of work to introduce 'coding' with 2DIY to pupils.

Graphics for Games

Here are some images from Bev Evans that could be really useful when making games;

Right click and "save as" to put onto your computer for use in 2DIY game making.

 

Tweaking the code

There is an option within 2DIY that gives you more of an idea of the ActionScript code used within the program. To activate this option you need to work through the following instructions;

• Run the latest version of 2DIY and then exit it – this will populate the .ini file if it has not been populated already.

• While 2DIY is not running, open the .ini file with Notepad. You can find the .ini file by browsing to C:\Program Files\2Simple Software\2DIY\2diy.ini

• The 2nd to last entry in the list is labelled as “outputCodeAsFile=False”. Change the value of this to true, save the .ini file and then exit it.

• Now run 2DIY, create an activity and press play.

• A text file named “2diy code.txt” will be created in your My Documents folder.

This text file will contain any AS code you have added as well as a lot which 2DIY adds in itself – this will differ, depending on which activity or game is used. You can see what code is used, and can experiment with making changes within the activities and see the results.

Thanks to Dan and Max at 2Simple who informed me of this feature last year, and have allowed it to be passed on for others to use as well.

A review of 2DIY

Year 5 at Springwell Junior school have been reviewing 2DIY. They created a video of their review. You can watch their video, and read their review here.

2DIY and non IE Flash

After a change of work laptops, I set up my new Windows7 machine, downloaded Chrome to use a browser and installed the Flash plugin for Chrome.

Then 2DIY was installed onto the machine, but when I tried to run it, I was given an error message related to Flash. Confused by this, I checked Chrome again, and Flash was working fine within it. 

Eventually I realised the problem - the Flash plugin for Chrome is different to Flash on Internet Explorer (IE uses ActiveX to install). Once Flash has been updated on Internet Explorer, 2DIY worked just fine.

So, a word of warning if you are moving over to Windows7, and planning not to use Internet Explorer, - you still need to update Flash on it to enable 2DIY to work properly.