Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children • Hacker News Board

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

#271

Post by alan_russell » Fri, Mar 31, 2023, 2:17 AM UTC

dunham wrote: post #100

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!

We had one in makecode that I had to look into after my kid left for school. (He was pretty frustrated.) Turned out that it wasn't applying changes we made in the code and the window needed to be reloaded. 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).

https://microblocks.fun/ have the same flexibility as Scratch. In fact, they are both works by John Maloney.

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

#272

Post by ivlad » Fri, Mar 31, 2023, 2:26 AM UTC

Ozzie_osman wrote: post #259

havnagiggle wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just want to say thank you! Two of my kids are using scratch regularly (8yo and 6yo). We started using the rpi module and I was surprised how easy it was to start banging out pins to control some motors. The fact that they can use it on a desktop, on a tablet, and it is integrated at school is just fantastic. I used Lego mindstorms ~15 years ago, and LabVIEW 10+ years ago. Scratch has much clearer concepts and patter…

Curious how you get a 6 year old started? What should I buy or do?

Go to Scratch site (https://scratch.mit.edu/), create an account and show them how to connect blocks together to make the avatar move? Do it together and then check out other people’s works at the same site. You can build upon them.

You don’t need to buy anything.

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

#273

Post by fernirello » Fri, Mar 31, 2023, 2:32 AM UTC

empressplay wrote: post #168

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?

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 https://…

Shout out to empressplay and her teammate(s) (sister?) for their work on turtleSpaces, an underrated, solid implementation of 3D logo in golang that can run on the browser. I've used it to teach children, and they've quite liked how easy it is to create 3D games and animations that can be looked at from any angle. Thank you for creating turtleSpaces and for the endless work adding features, fixing bugs, releasing new versions and quickly answering questions! I've no connection to it other than being a grateful user.

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

#274

Post by zdw » Fri, Mar 31, 2023, 2:40 AM UTC

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…

I get the feeling that graphical programming is the tooling problem.

The fundamental issue is that diff on textual code has no equivalent in a visual paradigm that doesn't have side effects - one example is that color often has meaning in visual systems, and thus is hard to use for showing differences.

I'd love to be proven wrong around this though.

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

#275

Post by frankosaurus » Fri, Mar 31, 2023, 2:48 AM UTC

nrjames wrote: post #232

As a parent who used Scratch with their kids... it all started out great and then veered into being an unregulated social media network lacking any ability to create a space where they could build and learn to code in private. It wasn't long before they were doing it only for the likes and, without constant supervision, trying to figure out how to join various groups and challenges simply for the attention they would…

I run the standalone Scratch program on an offline raspberry PI. My kids enjoy it. The best thing about offline is that they have to create something to play a game.

We formerly used Scratch online, starting in 2nd grade at school. It had good and bad aspects. It was great to follow griffpatch, who has really sophisticated coding tutorials. On the downside, they got creepy comments on their Scratch projects. There were also various ruses to get the kids to upvote projects, typical social media crap.

Also, being on the Scratch community means my kids could just search for someone else's clone of (insert game here). So Scratch can turn into just another way to play video games. With offline, that's not an option.

If your kids are good at self-regulation, online can be fine, though.

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

#276

Post by gnramires » Fri, Mar 31, 2023, 3:26 AM UTC

mkehrt wrote: post #138

thesausageking wrote: post #101

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 t…

Possibly Processing? or processing.js? The Coding Train on youtube (run by Daniel Shiffman) ( https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvjgXvBlbQiydffZU7m1_aw ) has some great tutorials.

I believe p5.js (used at https://editor.p5js.org/) is quite close to Scratch in spirit. Of course I think turning straight to javascript (the library really streamlines it) might be too difficult without instruction, so following some kind of tutorials or lessons would be necessary.

It's incredibly fun, and I've been making procedural... things for a while with it. Many artists use it (and of course every web tool is available... you can even later port the code to just straight canvas for the performance, although that's rarely necessary I guess).

See my little roguelike room generator: https://editor.p5js.org/gustavo.nramires/sketches/eyyxg7vl2

And a funky flower: https://editor.p5js.org/gustavo.nramires/sketches/hwhVUQu_X

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

#277

Post by codazoda » Fri, Mar 31, 2023, 3:43 AM UTC

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…

Is there any appetite to support more serious programming with Scratch? I’ve created a toy or two but would love to do more. The start/stop flags are the main blocker for me. If there was an option to start automatically and run forever (or until a break) I think I’d do a lot more experimenting with it.

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

#278

Post by lfnoise » Fri, Mar 31, 2023, 3:43 AM UTC

My son, 17, learned to program in Scratch, and wrote a lot of games in it. Since then he has learned Python, Lua (in which he wrote a space invaders), and Java in both high school and during the summer at Cornell. He can write in these languages, but the problem is, he thinks in Scratch. He always goes back to write things in Scratch. In Scratch he has written a number of ray tracing and path tracing renderers which can model roughness, specularity, ambient occlusion.. He teaches me stuff about rendering that he reads from papers. Right now he is working on an NES emulator in Scratch that necessarily includes a 6502 emulator. It can load and play Mario games. But I can't get him move his ideas to a textual language.

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

#279

Post by sharp11 » Fri, Mar 31, 2023, 3:53 AM UTC

lfnoise wrote: post #278

My son, 17, learned to program in Scratch, and wrote a lot of games in it. Since then he has learned Python, Lua (in which he wrote a space invaders), and Java in both high school and during the summer at Cornell. He can write in these languages, but the problem is, he thinks in Scratch. He always goes back to write things in Scratch. In Scratch he has written a number of ray tracing and path tracing renderers which…

That is utterly fascinating. From his pov, is it a problem, or only from yours?

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

#280

Post by aetherspawn » Fri, Mar 31, 2023, 3:55 AM UTC

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…

I actually spent 3 months and a few $k developing an automotive relay driver, pedal control and dual CAN shield for NI myRIO for firmware development of a small hobby car, electric go-kart, e-bike etc.

The hardware worked, but the usability of the standard blocks .. for some reason it was a disaster compared to other visual design tools like MATLAB Simulink.