91–100 of 397 posts
Anybody remember Logo? That turtle graphics program? That's what they taught us at school. Programming for kids surely has changed a lot since then.
Lynx (2D): https://lynxcoding.club turtleSpaces (3D): https://turtlespaces.org/weblogo
Logo is still taught by many schools, all around the world!
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…
Also sharing raw user count doesn't mean much. I have a suspicious github deletes far more bot accounts than scratch does and really we should care about something like MAU which takes into account retention.
Does no one do Logos anymore?
Lynx: https://lynxcoding.club
turtleSpaces: https://turtlespaces.org/weblogo
With LLM's, Scratch is probably a closer interface to the sort of programming we'll all be doing in the near future.
Full disclosure: Principal Software Engineer here on the Scratch backend... Scratch is not built to be a "teach your kid programming languages" system, it is based on the work and ideas of the Life Long Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab (the director of this group is Professor Mitch Resnick, the LEGO, Papert Professor of Learning Research). The Papert part is where the term Mindstorms comes from ( https://www.a…
I love this philosophy. Computing is so much more than application development. It's a creative tool, and exploration tool, a tool for finding insight and exploring spaces. Giving people access to those tools without gatekeeping or accidental complexity is fantastic.
The popularity "you need to start with SICP" and "BASIC mutilates programmers" lines of thinking have done so much damage to the way we, as an engineering community, think about the role of computation in society.
I'd imagine learning at least a little Python alongside Scratch would be more optimal than Scratch alone. It's like bilingual education, it has great benefits although individuals may gravitate towards a preferred option. Perhaps it's a bit like comparing Minecraft to Factorio: https://www.idtech.com/blog/scratch-vs-python Looking around, it also seems possible to set up your own Scratch server, which is comparable t…
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Games/Tutorials/2D_...
It's also more likely to run a few years from now, and it works on tablets, grandpa's ailing windows box, etc.
Full disclosure: Principal Software Engineer here on the Scratch backend... Scratch is not built to be a "teach your kid programming languages" system, it is based on the work and ideas of the Life Long Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab (the director of this group is Professor Mitch Resnick, the LEGO, Papert Professor of Learning Research). The Papert part is where the term Mindstorms comes from ( https://www.a…
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!
My ten year old is doing both scratch and makecode. The graphics in makecode are not as flexible as scratch, but it's fun to be able to make a game and run it on a physical device (pybadge).