My experience (past HN thread): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32122972
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
#162Isn't it pretty much the only coding community for children?
Headlines like this are always catchy but also not so. Largest community.. for children.. of 10-11 years.. :D the group just gets narrower and narrower as you read
Re: Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
We’re using an iPad. It’s theoretically aimed at older children (5+) but my son was able to pick it up no problem. I sat down with mine about 6 months ago (he was 3.75 at the time) and we learned what each of the blocks did and how to combine them. Now he asks to make a program and can do it independently. He experiments with the backgrounds, sound effects, loops and motion. My son can read but knowing how to count/r…
Really helpful - thanks for the details!
Re: Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children
#164Scratch is why I got into software. One day, more than 10 years ago, my dad showed me this weird program for making a cat move around, and the rest is history.
Re: Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children
#165Scratch also really lets you focus on one concept at a time. My son followed a programming course in scratch and the entire first lesson was about sequence, they learned to drag one instruction after another and saw how the order of steps impacted the result. I would have never conceived of explaining something as basic as sequence first, but scratch is ideal for that because it doesn’t require any boilerplate.
Re: Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children
#166Earlier 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.
sounds like the new Microsoft Loop product/service announced a few days ago
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2023/03/2...
Re: Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children
#167Folks 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 showed my younger kid some stupid JavaScript tricks in the browser developer console and he was off to the races, looking up how to make splashy buttons and the like. So I got them the "Get Coding" books, which are HTML/JavaScript. He's on to more elaborate things now.
I also showed my older kid some JavaScript and Python after he had messed around in Scratch for a while, and he was mildly interested and then went off to do other things. So YMMV because my mileage certainly varied.
Re: Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children
#168Folks 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?
turtleSpaces is a text-based variant of Logo with both 2D and 3D modes that runs in a web browser. Its syntax is very similar to Scratch, and it's less picky about formatting (doesn't care about white space, etc).
You can make 3D models (for printing), 2D artwork, and 2D and 3D animations and games. Once they're able to create things with turtleSpaces, it's much easier to move on to Python, Lua or Javascript
Re: Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children
#169If you’re interested in what’s on the backend I interviewed one of the infrastructure engineers and talked about it here
Re: Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children
#170They'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…
Every time you open a new instance of the Scratch editor, Scratch saves it as a new project. It's still a huge number but a bit skewed compared to e.g. Github.
103 million users is still more than 100 million developers though, even if you disregard the number of projects.