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Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children

scratch.mit.edu

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Re: Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children

#71

Post by Elte »

teucris wrote: post #45
cyrialize wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other platforms similar to Scratch actually teach Python! They start off with drag and drop coding and then Python. The Python is actually pretty fun, you write code to make animals move around and get stars.

Which platforms are you referring to?

Also not OP, but I literally just learned about Hedy [1] today. No experience except from clicking through it for 20 minutes, but it looks quite interesting, taking somebody from a language with a very simple syntax (and limited functionality) to full blown Python, one level at a time, by making the language gradually more complicated (and more powerful).

[1] https://www.hedycode.com/

Re: Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children

#72

Post by Turing_Machine »

snowwrestler wrote: post #43
balls187 wrote: post #3

Scratch is also one of the largest places for kids to play games.

This is true—and watch animated stories. But the cool thing is that for any game or story on Scratch, the kid can click into the project to see how it was made, and even access the code and assets. They can copy, fork, alter, build. The technology is different obviously, but it feels like the early days of the Web, when you could “view source” and “save as” to easily explore and learn how any web page was put togethe…

> But the cool thing is that for any game or story on Scratch, the kid can click into the project to see how it was made, and even access the code and assets.

Definitely an important feature for learning. Seeing something cool and then immediately being able to find out how it was done is much more motivating than reading and memorizing docs ahead of time.

It's similar in some respects the early days of the web when "View source" was enough to figure out how something worked. It's rather sad that feature has mostly been lost.

Re: Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children

#73

Post by csmeyer »

jawns wrote: post #51
yalogin wrote: post #50

Folks here who used scratch with their kids, what is the next step after scratch? How did you introduce a language/platform to your kid? I have introduced python and my kid is able to pick it up, but am unable to come up with projects that sustain interest. It feels dry without UI and one shouldn't be doing web dev with python too. So what is the progression for python and kids?

For our kids, the progression has been: - Scratch Jr. - Scratch - Replit Scratch helps them understand programming concepts such as variables, lists, conditionals, and events, but still in an intuitive visual programming interface. Replit gives the kids access to real programming languages (JS, Python, etc.) but with lots of support, and the same "remix other people's projects" culture. Indeed, our kids have found th…

What projects do your kids complete on replit? Are they following youtube tutorials or first party content from replit?

Re: Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children

#75

Post by meterplech »

ksab wrote: post #28

My 4 year old made his first program using Scratch Jr. What was this program? He made a story where cats jump up and down 25 times and then walk away. He recorded sound effects for the cats that repeated as the cats jump. It’s simple but offers so much more of a creative outlet than games/educational apps aimed at his age group.

This is really cool. Out of curiosity - how did you actually set this up for him to use? Was it on tablet or a computer or phone? Any suggestions for a dad of a 3.5 year old?

Also, is he reading / at what level? Trying to get a feel for when I can introduce it to him.

Re: Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children

#76

Post by qikInNdOutReply »

asciii wrote: post #14
JoeOfTexas wrote: post #13

My 9 year old daughter surprised me yesterday with her little game made with Scratch. I was impressed. I surprised her back when I did user-testing haha. She discovered the fun world of bugs and user's doing things they shouldn't!

> I surprised her back when I did user-testing Wait till she gets tough PR reviews. This block is ugly, and our team does not like looking at it :P

Remember that robblox investigation, were they interviewed that 12 year old that already talked like a burned out developer, feeling cheated out of the revenue. The children yearn for the mines..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gXlauRB1EQ

Re: Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children

#80

Post by __mharrison__ »

Retr0id wrote: post #52

They're selling it short - it's the largest coding community full stop. "As of 15 February, 2023, community statistics on the language's official website show more than 123 million projects shared by over 103 million users, over 804 million total projects"[1] Compare to GitHub: "As of January 2023, GitHub reported having over 100 million developers and more than 372 million repositories"[2] Of course, the average Scr…

Pretty sure Excel is the largest coding group in the world, they just don't share their code in Github.
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