New WHEN block appearing in "mircroworlds"

[maryfries]

Happy New Year all! :)

We noticed that the new WHEN predicate hat block has appeared in our starter project files (example 1, example 2).

In the past, there were some new primitives that automatically appeared in BJC projects, and it hasn't happened in a while, but this one new block does seem to be in starter projects throughout BJC Sparks. Any ideas for how to handle that? Should we need to go through all the XMLs in our repo and hide each one individually, or is there some way to hide it from your end—and if not, is there a way to stop this from happening with the addition of future new primitives?

Thanks and best wishes for a great 2025!

[jmoenig]

Hi Mary! That should be the right thing, because I've changed the appearance of the old block -- it now has the infinty symbol on it -- so what you're seeing should be correct, or are you also seeing the other version?

[maryfries]

Hi Jens! I'm not entirely sure what you mean. We didn't want a WHEN block in those projects, and somehow it recently appeared in all of them.

[brianharvey]

The difference in point of view here is that Jens is thinking "the project contains a list of the blocks it hides" and Mary is thinking "we have in mind a list of the blocks that aren't hidden."

What's "the right thing," I guess, depends on whether you're hiding most of the blocks (as in Mary's Parsons-problem view) or hiding a few of the blocks, e.g., because you want students to recreate a particular primitive block (as, sort of, in the blocks accessible only via relabel).

I suppose in principle Snap! could put a flag in saved projects that would be XORed with each block's hidden bit, so some projects could keep track of shown blocks rather than hidden blocks, but since I've never really been comfortable with the whole idea of hiding blocks, I'm not agitating for this.

[jmoenig]

Ah, no, I get it now. If you were hiding the generic When hat before it shouldn't appear in any new version. Let me look into this, thank you!

[jmoenig]

This is definitly a bug, sorry! I'm fixing it now for the upcoming release.

[jmoenig]

Thanks, again, Mary! I've just fixed it in dev for the upcoming release, which will once again hide all blocks that you've previously hid in your microworlds. Trying out example1 and example2 seems to work in dev.

[maryfries]

Fantastic! Thanks so much!! :)