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Try Phosphorus, an HTML5 Scratch interpreter: http://phosphorus.github.io/#63476480 Also, Snap ! is basically Scratch without Flash, but with everything awesome from SICP: http://snap.berkeley.edu/run/
Neat! But I guess it doesn't work for all games? http://phosphorus.github.io/#64974428 Snap looks cool, though! It can even import Scratch projects! Neat!
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...none of these are "turn on and play". For any of the above, what's the command to draw a triangle?
What was it on the C64? I would have thought you would have had to write a program to do it. What is the command to spawn a zombie on the C64? Or to display a gif? Or to download data from an Internet service?
Oh, definitely, but drawing itself was a primitive. With Javascript you need html, css, canvas.... it's a damn nightmare.
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I was trying to be careful not to do that, and you'll see that I didn't. So long as we're not in conflict it's okay, and certainly Scratch is more than cats and barns. But my point remains that cats and barns could be interpreted as "fun because they're kids" since no CS prof in their right mind would teach students that way at, say, MIT. Maybe robots. The problem isn't with teachers who teach the magic of computers…
Yes, perhaps I was being a bit unfair. However, bad teachers will always be with us, and won't start teaching the magic of computers just because you give them a c64 or basic. They'll just make kids write endless employee pay calculator programs and other drudgery. I do agree with your general sentiment about the transparency of "intent to entertain". But I really don't see it with scratch. There's a silly cat on the…
The only meaningful point I might add would be that kids love to compete with adults. They want the real thing. Of course, most can't handle the real thing, so we give them what we think they can handle. Except, for the smart kids, the bar is always too low because it has to be adjusted for the averages. So they feel like they're being treated like kids, and that their intelligence is being undermined, and they may even feel discriminated against. Basically, they don't think of themselves as kids. We the adults think of them as kids. Not that they aren't kids of course, but we should never limit their intelligence based on what we think they can handle.
It's a shame modern video games are so complex and cinematic. To Scratch's credit, here is mario:
https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/31583772/#editor
and:
I never liked anthropomorphic neotenized animals. Create a programming language with transformers or thundercats not a cat on meds (j/k, that project is cool, but you know what I mean!). I learned to program with QBasic and I know many others learned to program with the ZX Spectrum or similar machines. If kids can learn the abstractions of the English language, be high dans in Go, get accepted into college, and achie…
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I've been a CodeDojo and Scratch mentor for a few years and, although I haven't read much of the research, block-based programming fills a great niche for kids that know how to read, but have a hard time typing. Typing and syntax issues hinder the experience for very young children learning to code. Scratch allows children to learn computational thinking concepts through a creative computing experience. Keeping it si…
Ah that's a good point that both you and scottcha make regarding the typing strengths/weaknesses of children, which would make a typing-based approach maybe non-practical. I guess more generally what I was trying to better understand was whether or not the use of these fitted blocks (as I understand Scratch to do) has been studied enough to be considered more fruitful in developing an understanding of rudimentary pro…
Here are a few good links that might help.
http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/12/11/458782056/a-kids-c...
Mitch Resnick's TED talk from 2012: https://www.ted.com/talks/mitch_resnick_let_s_teach_kids_to_...