Scratch supports message-passing and concurrency, which makes writing parallel programs fairly straight-forward. This is usually considered a more advanced series of programming concepts, and yet, I've seen children use them for their own games. The language is more powerful than you think!
Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children
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Re: Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children
#152They'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.
You have to wonder why there isn't a huge online excel community.
Re: Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children
#153My 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 t…
my kids really like CodeCombat
Re: Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Community" being the key word.
All Microsoft needs to do here is to include a stripped down IM inside Excel, a blend between MS Teams and Chatroulette, but with a twist: it will upload what you're working on to Bing to take a look at, group you with others whose Excel sheets are closest to your in the latent space, and connect you all in a group chat. Like magic, fluid, self-associative communities.
I can see why this got down-voted, but seeing this in fruition would be quite interesting.
Of course, this would probably require sharing internal corporate data which is a big no-no.
Re: Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children
#155Everyone talks about their kids trying Scratch but I'm pretty young myself, I remember playing with Scratch when I was a kid, very simple games that I would then show my friends. It was a fun experience.
Re: Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children
#156Without scratch I would not have connected with programming the way I did when I was a kid. Fantastic program, and a great community as well.
Re: Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children
#157Re: Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children
#158Folks 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?
I put my kids through both scratch and khan academy javascript. I've found that it helps them come to terms a lot with the underlying mechanics of scratch and my oldest is now graduating onto building web apps. When my child hits a hurdle and feels like doing something easier they go back to scratch.
Re: Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have never seen a programmer as excited to tell me about something like, say, Duff's Device as I've seen one excel user hear another ask "what're pivot tables"? and to have the other reply "Let me show you..." That may have to do with the kind of party I end up at, but "helping each other out" is a rather important feature of any community. There are also Excel championships with a prize. https://www.fmworldcup.com…
I'm amused that's still going, one of my classmates qualified for and attended the Word championship hosted in Vegas many years ago. As for programming prizes, "last week" if we're counting bug-bounties, "a few years ago" if we're counting CTFs, and 5 years ago if we're not. Clearly there is an Excel community in the general sense but as far as I know it isn't centered around any particular venue - at least, not one…
Infosec is a community unto itself. What was the competition 5 years ago?