Just my experience though, but I had better results with Alice: http://www.alice.org/ the 3D building blocks were more appeal. Now I cannot believe that they moved the objects using drag and drop with a small basic notebook touchpad. BTW I am talking about normal IQ children.
Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children
301–310 of 397 posts
Re: Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
are you sure? how does that work? how does git clone know to only give me my fork and not the whole repository? to my understanding they must be full copies. they can use hardlinks to avoid duplicating files to save space.
Re: Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children
#303Full 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…
My son has language disorder and we just build together a Scratch program to train his inflection skills. Lists of verbs randomly mix with lists of adjectives and nouns.
There are plenty of things that I would instinctively improve about Scratch, especially text outputs, but in the end Scratch is amazing at what it does.
Thank you!
Re: Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children
#304Full 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…
> and "BASIC mutilates programmers" lines of thinking have done so much damage to the way we, as an engineering community, think about the role of computation in society.
I learned BASIC when I was about 7 years old by reading the books and banging out code. When I didnt have access to a computer, I wrote the code on paper and entered it later. I can say that it was very hard for me to wrap my head around the C style syntax after a few years of immersion as a kid. I did get over it and I think that the problem helped me develop a deeper understanding of programming concepts. So maybe both can be true?
Re: Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children
#305Full 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…
My son has language disorder and we just build together a Scratch program to train his inflection skills. Lists of verbs randomly mix with lists of adjectives and nouns. There are plenty of things that I would instinctively improve about Scratch, especially text outputs, but in the end Scratch is amazing at what it does. Thank you!
No, thank you! I really mean this, your feedback matters to us as we are continuously working on accessibility issues with both presentation and usability.
Re: Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children
#306Full 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…
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…
Thank you! I also grew up around the time of HyperCard and BASIC on PCs, and spent hours carefully typing in programs from magazines. I can look back on that and find a lot of warm memories. I can also look at it with a critical eye and question how much I would have learned about general computation principles if there was something like Scratch available during that time period.
Re: Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children
#307False; python is the worlds largest community of children programming (\s)
Re: Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children
#308Full 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…
First of all, let me tell you that scratch is a wonderful project. I have only one, but pretty important criticism: The tutorials that are packages with the installer use screenshots that are not translated and thus are pretty much worthless unless your kids speak English. I was pretty hyped on scratch, but this pretty much prevents self directed learning from happening.
Hello, and apologies,
Given our limited resources, we have translated the tutorials (both the spoken language and the written words in the videos as appropriate) into a subset of the languages that Scratch has been translated into (> 50 languages). The tutorials themselves have been translated into Spanish, French, Japanese, Mandarin, Cantonese, Russian, Turkish, and more. This includes both the spoken words and the written ones. The specific updates to enable this were done in the last two years, so perhaps your experience was prior to that work?
One of my favorite things to show off is switching between Right→Left languages vs Left→Right languages, I encourage everyone to try it! These translations are also a struggle. It adds a lot of extra data to the downloadable and standalone Scratch application and we cannot assume that there will be a network connection available to enable a just-in-time download approach.
Re: Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children
#309Full 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.
Me too! I have had various toy projects that make use of the open source Scratch editor to do this exact thing and writing extensions that would enable this. While our our extension system can enable this, we are very careful about adding extensions to the live site that might enable a project to spam connections and inadvertently creating a DDoS system.
Re: Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children
#310As 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…
"...lacking any ability to create a space where they could build and learn to code in private."
Correct, this is by design, the way to go for the private/no on-line community aspects would be to use the downloadable stand-alone Scratch editor. Based on the self-selecting group of users who agree to send back telemetry usage for the stand-alone editor, we believe that over half of all Scratch users are only using the stand-alone editor. Last year this was somewhere in the range of ~100-150 million individuals worldwide.
On the website, we regularly evaluate how we can downplay the worst aspects of a social network, such as, not showing the exact count of certain indicators of likes/stars/views in various areas of the site (e.g. showing 100+ vs 203, etc.)