11–20 of 102 posts
I wonder what the best modern equivalent would be? Perhaps web/JS is easy enough to get into these days?
I think there's a misplaced focus on "first" experiences being optimal in some way. Whether a kid is going to take to programming or not is pretty unlikely to change based on whether they're introduced to a block-based or text-based language, or whether it's object oriented or functional (the push for objects-first has mostly died off, but I still see remnants of it in various curricula). If it's got a few basics lik…
Growing up, that meant Flash and Java.
Still not sure why we decided to make the internet stop being awesome.
I used scratch in cs50 to make a music platformer. I would say it led me down a career in computing
My hobby projects are almost always video games to this day, partially because of it. I even built my first compiler/interpreter on there before I knew what those words meant, and got exposed to lots of math that I otherwise wouldn't have seen until high school. Being able to easily discover what others were doing, and learn from their projects, helped me out a lot.
It will always be special to me, as I'm sure BASIC and such are to others.
https://www.blockscad3d.com/editor/
to rough out designs as well as simple algorithms for OpenSCAD and ultimately, PythonSCAD for my current project:
It was quite excellent, along with stuff like Clik n' Play. Basically "event driven" + "blocks so you can't have syntax errors and other silliness" was very good for me.