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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

#261

Post by versteegen »

mjb wrote: post #96
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…

> We build and support Scratch to provide creative tools for anyone to explore computation in a from that is relatable and has a low floor for understanding/entry. 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…

Truth is, QBASIC was one of the best programming environments for beginner programmers. Sure it wasn't sophisticated like Turbo Pascal or Smalltalk, but with a single button you could switch back and forth between running your code and live-editing it. If an error occurred you could correct it and continue from where you were. Unfortunately when you got too close to the 640KB memory limit it was no longer possible to fit both the editor and the program in memory at the same time.

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

#262

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

schneems wrote: post #250
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…

Wow. Thanks for posting! I’m curious of your thoughts on other visual programming languages. Specifically LabVIEW. My first job out of college was at NI where they heavily use LabVIEW. Every engineer in my cohort thought that paradigm was going to take off and over a decade later, it clearly hasn’t. One large factor is cost and proprietary tech, but I’m surprised few outside of the hardware testing world even know su…

What’s NI?

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

#263

Post by Gracana »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #262
schneems wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. Thanks for posting! I’m curious of your thoughts on other visual programming languages. Specifically LabVIEW. My first job out of college was at NI where they heavily use LabVIEW. Every engineer in my cohort thought that paradigm was going to take off and over a decade later, it clearly hasn’t. One large factor is cost and proprietary tech, but I’m surprised few outside of the hardware testing world even know su…

What’s NI?

National Instruments. https://www.ni.com/en-us/shop/labview.html

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

#264

Post by coffeebeqn »

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…

Are you hiring backend engineers in the near future? Asking for a friend, naturally

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

#265

Post by charcircuit »

sokoloff wrote: post #183
charcircuit wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is scratch counting remixes in the total projects? I doubt Github is counting folks. 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.

Why wouldn't github count forks? I have several repos forked with my own local changes. (I also have some repos forked without changes.) They should absolutely count forks with commits on them at the very least.

>Why wouldn't github count forks?

Internally all forks are stored in the original repository. So it would be reasonable to expect Github to just count the number of repositories that exists.

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

#266

Post by jkestner »

vb234 wrote: post #146
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’ve been tempted to teach my daughter programming with scratch. At what age did you introduce your daughter to Scratch and programming? Where there any helpful/fun guides you or she discovered along the way?

In spite of learning Logo at 6, I didn’t try to introduce programming to my kids, but my 7yo daughter picked up Scratch-based web programming during school where they did Hour of Code. (Pleasantly surprised considering Texas’ slow bleeding of public schools.) It’s a free site filled with focused, guided activities using block programming and probably other languages. One is Dance Party where you sequence dancers and their stage to a music track, and in another you teach Elsa to skate patterns into the ice in a modern twist on Logo.

They do a lot of Minecraft now but are interested in TinkerCAD, which I’ll solidify by printing some of their designs. Not sure any of the beginner CAD apps are really easy, though.

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

#267

Post by geomark »

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?

A few years ago I struggled to find a good next step to go from Scratch to Python. A couple of platforms advocated the approach of have one tab with block code and another with the equivalent text-based code. That didn't seem to work, because it was just easier for the kid to stay in the graphical tab and not really absorb what was happening in the text-based code.

I ended up making something myself, a web-based Python tutorial that uses Turtle graphics and trinket.io. It's more of a tutorial and not gamified and doesn't have substantial projects like building games. It introduces Python elements in steps where the student has to use them to draw some graphics using Turtle. Worked out pretty well to get my kid launched in the direction where he now does more substantial Python projects.

Added: I structured it using the PRIMM approach.

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

#268

Post by vb234 »

sokoloff wrote: post #192
vb234 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been tempted to teach my daughter programming with scratch. At what age did you introduce your daughter to Scratch and programming? Where there any helpful/fun guides you or she discovered along the way?

I introduced to my kids at around 6 and 8. 6 was maybe a little early, but not much (and will vary by kid, of course). One thing that really added to the fun when they were making games is I got a PS3 controller (which is bluetooth) and connected that to the computer as a keyboard, which Scratch code can then read and use in the games. The first big (for them) project we did was: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/2194…

Thank you. Scratch Jr looks interesting and is probably a better introduction for my 6 year old.

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

#269

Post by vb234 »

JoeOfTexas wrote: post #172
vb234 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been tempted to teach my daughter programming with scratch. At what age did you introduce your daughter to Scratch and programming? Where there any helpful/fun guides you or she discovered along the way?

She uses it at school, but no one taught her how to use it. She has followed tutorials for making games on Roblox Studio in the past. However, kids just hit the ground running with Scratch way better than adults.

That makes a lot of sense. As a lapsed programmer myself, I found the Scratch interface was not very intuitive.

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

#270

Post by p1necone »

Dalewyn wrote: post #243
dfex wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I grew up with Applesoft BASIC and later HyperCard - as a kid, I was never a "Developer", but I was always curious - the fact that I could take someone else's source code and change it to my will felt like a superpower. Now Scratch has more than filled that gap for my own children, and while they may never choose to pursue a career in IT, the fact that they are able to explore the field so easily is invaluable and ma…

>the fact that I could take someone else's source code and change it to my will felt like a superpower. The ability to go and tell your computer to do something and then see the computer do it is, in a word, mindblowing. I know it was mindblowing for childhood me. My experiences with programming were HTML4.01 and CSS2, PHP, Ruby, and some more abstract forms of "programming" (RPG Maker!), and they all gave me a healt…

RPG Maker was great, I've been meaning to go back and build something with it again now that I have actual developer skills.
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