Users may be unfamiliar with <, > symbols

TL;DR: During the Extension Categories External Playtest (8/3/17), we noticed some users were not yet familiar with the less-than sign (“<”, and presumably greater-than as well, “>”). Is there a way we could make its meaning clearer in Scratch, such as e.g. using the words “less than” (etc.)?

We will be going through issues with label playtest soon, at which point we may want to make a single issue about some of these conceptual issues - we may want to combine this issue with https://github.com/LLK/scratch-gui/issues/483.

Example of what we observed: One of the users had a plan for how to use the WeDo distance sensor with a physical object to trigger the project to play a sound when the distance was closer. The value with no obstruction was 100 and the values we observed when the object passed in front of the distance sensor were 10, 20, 30, in that range. Although the user seemed to understand that we needed some kind of block that involved distance being less than a value (50, 100, something like that), they had a hard time finding the relevant block. When I asked them what the “when distance < [50]” block said, they were not sure how to read the less-than symbol. When I asked them if they knew what it was, they were unfamiliar with it.

[ed-cooper]

Alternate suggestion: What about a “Simple English” language for the Scratch editor? I don’t know how much would actually change as most of the blocks are fairly self explanatory, but it’s just another idea

[jwzimmer-zz]

Hi @Kenny2github, @mrjacobbloom & @liam4, just to let you know, we are not necessarily going to change anything related to how “<” and “>” are displayed - we have seen users who are otherwise basically able to use the program get stumped on those symbols, so we want to consider what kind of options we might have to improve that use case, but that doesn’t mean we will definitely be making any changes (and changes might be to resources rather than to the editor itself, etc.). So I wouldn’t advise you to spend too much time on this, at this point. Thanks!