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Thinking of it now, I wonder if the two approaches could be combined?
I love teaching Scratch to kids. Some years ago, I used to do "CoderDojo", which is like a hobby club where kids can learn programming. Some kids go to soccer, others to art academy — and these kids learn programming. Super cool to teach. However, most kids get stuck after they master Scratch. Especially kids around the age of 8–10. They learn Scratch. It's awesome. They make some advanced games and really get the ha…
Maybe you could try something like that?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It sounds like you want the ability to instantiate a scratch block that contains a text box, which in turn contains the function body for the block? It would then be possible to incrementally write as little or as much as desired in text. Getting fancy, that block could use a backend interpreter/compiler of choice, so the language could be Squeak, Python, C, an LLM generator, ...
> It sounds like you want the ability to instantiate a scratch block that contains a text box, which in turn contains the function body for the block ? That is the escape hatch from all visual development environments. Having seen Talend and W4 in action, I know the end state of the process: a single block with everything in it - I'm barely caricaturing here. Maybe the specific needs of early learners will keep the s…
I love teaching Scratch to kids. Some years ago, I used to do "CoderDojo", which is like a hobby club where kids can learn programming. Some kids go to soccer, others to art academy — and these kids learn programming. Super cool to teach. However, most kids get stuck after they master Scratch. Especially kids around the age of 8–10. They learn Scratch. It's awesome. They make some advanced games and really get the ha…
I love teaching Scratch to kids. Some years ago, I used to do "CoderDojo", which is like a hobby club where kids can learn programming. Some kids go to soccer, others to art academy — and these kids learn programming. Super cool to teach. However, most kids get stuck after they master Scratch. Especially kids around the age of 8–10. They learn Scratch. It's awesome. They make some advanced games and really get the ha…
- graphical
- more advanced (inherently parallel, more useful async data structures like events and queues)
- interfaces with tons of cool hardware
- built in network programming
- pretty powerful debugging
- free with community edition
Once they have the basics down, you could transition them out to a text based language slowly, even using the c/Matlab based text nodes to start
I love teaching Scratch to kids. Some years ago, I used to do "CoderDojo", which is like a hobby club where kids can learn programming. Some kids go to soccer, others to art academy — and these kids learn programming. Super cool to teach. However, most kids get stuck after they master Scratch. Especially kids around the age of 8–10. They learn Scratch. It's awesome. They make some advanced games and really get the ha…
Would something like Blockly [0] or MakeCode [1] fill that gap? [0] https://developers.google.com/blockly/ [1] https://makecode.microbit.org/
https://www.blockscad3d.com/editor/
which uses it to wrap up (most of) OpenSCAD for interactive 3D modeling.
Thank you for making this! My initial take was to share this with my son who used to built all kinds of things in Scratch, but I know that the lack of simple install instructions will be a deal-breaker for him. Given that (part of) your audience will be persons like my son graduating out of graphical programming in Scratch, it might be worth spending a little time on non-dev install instructions. Even more so as you…
[1]: https://aspizu.github.io/goboscript/ [2]: https://aspizu.github.io/goboscript/install/#install-from-bi...
Next step: create a visual programming language that compiles to goboscript.
Looks fantastic! Now it simply needs a non-Scratch runtime and a Scratch-like frontend, and we'll finally be able to teach bootstrapping to the 5-10 year old demographic.
I love teaching Scratch to kids. Some years ago, I used to do "CoderDojo", which is like a hobby club where kids can learn programming. Some kids go to soccer, others to art academy — and these kids learn programming. Super cool to teach. However, most kids get stuck after they master Scratch. Especially kids around the age of 8–10. They learn Scratch. It's awesome. They make some advanced games and really get the ha…
Then I surveyed older kids, when they get to middle school and they transition immediately from scratch to Python and Java using VS Code. The words students use to describe programming take a dark turn: hard, frustrating, scary, not for me, are the top sentients. Programming starts up there next to recess in terms of K-6 approval rating, but plummets to to math class status in just a few years.
I attribute the change to language a tool design. This change in sentiment happens exactly when they are taken from tools designed for kids and forced to use tools designed for professional programmers. There's a chasm between Scratch and "real" programming languages. As lauded as Python is for being a good beginner or learning language, it does not fill that gap. In fact, it's part of the problem -- people believing it's a good enough first language prevents other perhaps better suited languages from being adopted. It may be a good language for dev-brained individuals, but for other people they can get discouraged very easily by it and the tooling ecosystem. I teach graduate students who find it perplexing, so middle school students don't stand a chance.