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MIT's Scratch Team releases Scratch 2.0 editor and player as open source

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Re: MIT's Scratch Team releases Scratch 2.0 editor and player as open source

#11

Post by pbhjpbhj »

300bps wrote: post #7

I played with Scratch for some time with my 9 year old son. They've done an excellent job with it. We ended up using Construct 2, only because they've done an even better job and it releases to HTML 5, is playable on all kinds of devices including iPad.

https://www.scirra.com/construct2 - not seen that before, thanks for the tip.

Edit: looks like it's Windows only. Will try with WINE.

Edit2: Pretty buggy on WINE over Kubuntu 14.04 - crashes when trying to start project from template or when run layout on empty project.

Re: MIT's Scratch Team releases Scratch 2.0 editor and player as open source

#12

Post by craigching »

300bps wrote: post #7

I played with Scratch for some time with my 9 year old son. They've done an excellent job with it. We ended up using Construct 2, only because they've done an even better job and it releases to HTML 5, is playable on all kinds of devices including iPad.

I found this on the education link:

>Construct 2 is a visual drag-and-drop game creator for Windows.

Is that true, it's only for Windows? I'd like to know more, but I use Mac OSX and ideally I'd like something that ran there and/or on the iPad.

Re: MIT's Scratch Team releases Scratch 2.0 editor and player as open source

#14

Post by rasur »

davexunit wrote: post #6

It's unfortunate that Scratch is built upon the Flash platform. Though Scratch has been released under the GPL, it requires nonfree software in order to run. Scratch looks interesting, but I cannot recommend its use until this problem is fixed.

The Scratch I knew from a while ago was built on Smalltalk, and in fact there's an updated version that runs on Pharo Smalltalk, called 'Phratch'.

I have not compared the two, but if you want a freer version, I would recommend looking at http://www.phratch.com/

Re: MIT's Scratch Team releases Scratch 2.0 editor and player as open source

#16

Post by Rusky »

craigching wrote: post #12
300bps wrote: post #7

I played with Scratch for some time with my 9 year old son. They've done an excellent job with it. We ended up using Construct 2, only because they've done an even better job and it releases to HTML 5, is playable on all kinds of devices including iPad.

I found this on the education link: >Construct 2 is a visual drag-and-drop game creator for Windows. Is that true, it's only for Windows? I'd like to know more, but I use Mac OSX and ideally I'd like something that ran there and/or on the iPad.

Stencyl is another similar tool that runs on Win/Mac/Linux and exports to HTML5 (as well as native).

Re: MIT's Scratch Team releases Scratch 2.0 editor and player as open source

#17

Post by mercer »

jimmar wrote: post #15

Interesting project! Just a note--I got to step 3 of 13 on the Scratch tutorial and the language switched to Dutch or something ("3 Dansen maar Voeg een nieuw NEEM STAPPEN-blok toe. Klik in het blok en typ een min-teken.")

That's Dutch, and I did a double take when I suddenly saw Dutch in my Hacker News!

I can't wait to have my siblings try some programming with this tool!

Re: MIT's Scratch Team releases Scratch 2.0 editor and player as open source

#18

Post by gw »

I've taught a few kids using Scratch and it works quite well. I'm happy to hear they're working on an HTML5 version, and hopefully it will be possible to install if offline like the current Adobe AIR version does. I teach with a few netbooks running Ubuntu, and can't always rely on having internet, so I had to install the last version of AIR that supported Linux to get it working.

There is also an unaffiliated app for Android called Pocket Code that is clearly inspired by Scratch. It works nicely on Nexus 7 tablets, and touch screens are clearly more natural for kids, but it is buggy and more limited than Scratch so I had to stop using it. Hopefully it will improve, or the Scratch team will provide their own mobile port (not a simple task, of course).

Re: MIT's Scratch Team releases Scratch 2.0 editor and player as open source

#19

Post by codewiz »

Turtle Art (AKA Turtle Blocks) is another LOGO-derived educational language with aims similar to Scratch.

Turtle Art is free software and its block language seems more powerful and orthogonal. It can be extended with inline Python expressions or by loading Python scripts. I think it's a great way to introduce young children to the basic concepts of programming with a smooth transition to a mainstream language.

While Turtle Art is bundled with the OLPC-derived Sugar learning environment, it also works on a regular Linux desktop.

Get it here: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Turtle_Art

Re: MIT's Scratch Team releases Scratch 2.0 editor and player as open source

#20

Post by praveenster »

nighthawk24 wrote: post #4

Catroid is another cool related project https://github.com/Catrobat/Catroid

There is a feature request for GSoC 2014 "Make Pocket Code Bricks feature-complete to Scratch"

http://developer.catrobat.org/gsoc_2014_ideas_page#featureco...

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