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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

#101

Post by thesausageking »

My 8 yo loves Scratch. She's made over 30 apps with it and has had a great time. However, now that she's reached the limits of what it can do, I have been frustrated that there isn't a natural place for her to graduate to. And Scratch does get really limited quickly.

There are unofficial forks like SheepTester's one which let you drop JavaScript into Scratch projects, but they're not easy to use. We've failed a few times trying to setup it and make her successful with it. And it also requires you to know JavaScript moderately well.

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

#103

Post by ar9av »

Scratch gets a lot of hate with semi-experienced programmers (the kind to browse this sub) because of its simplicity, but it's actually really good. It teaches you basic programming concepts without all of the complexity of other programming languages.

I remember back in school, some of the students in my computer science classes didn't understand the basic concepts of programming: variables, loops, functions, etc. and programming is 90% logic and problem-solving.

You can't teach programming by teaching the syntax of a language, you have to teach logic. If you know one language, figuring out another is going to be easy because most of the things are the same, the only difference is the syntax.

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

#105

Post by distcs »

Not a Scratch user. Also not a child here. A grown up software programmer. But I did try Scratch and I could not make much sense of it. Maybe I am missing something. So read this comment as a request for help.

The last time I tried, I remember I had to drag and drop building blocks available as tiles. Some tiles made the character turn right. Some tiles did something else. Some implemented conditionals. Am I remembering it right?

And then when you run the program, the character moves across the screen in the way it was programmed. Is that all? Is there something more that we can do with Scratch? Can we write an interactive adventure game for example?

Just making sure I did not miss something. I would really like to try it again but not sure what I was missing. Or is it really meant for children and it would not appeal to adults?

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

#106

Post by Retr0id »

distcs wrote: post #105

Not a Scratch user. Also not a child here. A grown up software programmer. But I did try Scratch and I could not make much sense of it. Maybe I am missing something. So read this comment as a request for help. The last time I tried, I remember I had to drag and drop building blocks available as tiles. Some tiles made the character turn right. Some tiles did something else. Some implemented conditionals. Am I remember…

Scratch also has variables, lists, if/else and looping control flow structures, and procedures (the main limitation, imho, being that procedures don't have scoped local variables and cannot return a value)

It also has event-based concurrency.

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

#107

Post by n3storm »

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…

Many kids created several user profiles. Most of the times when they "level up" and for example "learn functions" (custom blocks), instead of create new projects with the learning old ones they create a new user profile so I would at least divide 103 million users by two.

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

#108

Post by outworlder »

cgk wrote: post #83

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…

Scratch really seems to be well-designed, from what I've seen.

I actually wanted to use Scratch to program Home Assistant automations. My day job is enough 'serious' programming already. Plus maybe my family would be able to modify some automations.

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

#109

Post by Retr0id »

n3storm wrote: post #107
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…

Many kids created several user profiles. Most of the times when they "level up" and for example "learn functions" (custom blocks), instead of create new projects with the learning old ones they create a new user profile so I would at least divide 103 million users by two.

Anecdotally, I have at least 3 GitHub profiles

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

#110

Post by fayten »

distcs wrote: post #105

Not a Scratch user. Also not a child here. A grown up software programmer. But I did try Scratch and I could not make much sense of it. Maybe I am missing something. So read this comment as a request for help. The last time I tried, I remember I had to drag and drop building blocks available as tiles. Some tiles made the character turn right. Some tiles did something else. Some implemented conditionals. Am I remember…

You can make some pretty robust stuff with Scratch.

User griffpatch has made a lot of advanced stuff here: https://scratch.mit.edu/users/griffpatch/

He has a youtube series too about building a 2D RPG in Scratch along with a built in tile editor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lof-Nu1VVE&list=PLy4zsTUHwG...

There is also a faster interpreter called TurboWarp that runs significantly faster than the official Scratch implementation: https://turbowarp.org/

Here is an example of the old 2d space shooter Tyrian running in turbowarp: https://turbowarp.org/151417355

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