MIT Scratch – Teach kids to program stories, games, and animations
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Re: MIT Scratch – Teach kids to program stories, games, and animations
#2We use scratch and its clones phratch/snap/bingo at our local coderdojo to great effect. Today I discovered Dr Scratch http://drscratch.programamos.es which does an analysis on your code.
Re: MIT Scratch – Teach kids to program stories, games, and animations
#3We use scratch and its clones phratch/snap/bingo at our local coderdojo to great effect. Today I discovered Dr Scratch http://drscratch.programamos.es which does an analysis on your code.
I teach a game programming club for kids in grade 6-8
I'm split on scratch. On the surface it was easy to get the kids to engage, but I didn't really feel it led to much understanding of programming as a whole. And it did not seem to hold their attention for very long.
I switched to C# XNA, with a good number of my own convenience libraries and boiler plates that allowed the kids to dig in and they haven't looked back. It's just very sad that Microsoft dumped XNA, and also that it's locked to windows which caused a lot of problems(basically only 30% of the kids had access to a windows PC and the club basically had to provide the kids access to a windows PC lab to work, which prevented many kids from being able to work on their games outside of the lab).
I'm continuing to look for another framework like XNA that has a sufficiently easy barrier to entry(with a good amount of guidance from teachers/club leaders), while really introducing the kids to programming.
For reference, here is a github snapshot of an example project I took the kids through with great success a few years back: https://github.com/zeewheeler/space_shooter_vgpc.git
Re: MIT Scratch – Teach kids to program stories, games, and animations
#4We use scratch and its clones phratch/snap/bingo at our local coderdojo to great effect. Today I discovered Dr Scratch http://drscratch.programamos.es which does an analysis on your code.
I teach a game programming club for kids in grade 6-8 I'm split on scratch. On the surface it was easy to get the kids to engage, but I didn't really feel it led to much understanding of programming as a whole. And it did not seem to hold their attention for very long. I switched to C# XNA, with a good number of my own convenience libraries and boiler plates that allowed the kids to dig in and they haven't looked bac…
My son and I have been having some fun with Gosu (https://github.com/jlnr/gosu). No problems so far running it on Windows and Ubuntu.
Re: MIT Scratch – Teach kids to program stories, games, and animations
#5We have been teaching kids Scratch for 3 years in a weekly free class in downtown Oakland. The response has been wonderful. It unleashes the creativity in kids, and some children that are utterly silent and shy open right up when they have questions about how to make their game do this or that.
I have literally heard kids shout out "Oh! That's why we learned those x y things in school!" when learning how to move sprites about on a grid. They have no idea they are learning math, and they generally have a spectacular time making even the simplest game, like a scrolling shooter, or moon lander.
My favorite discovery during our three years has been seeing how kids name their games. It's never "David's Moon Lander." It's always something more like "David's Super Awesome Cat Launching Space Lander With Flame Throwers." It's like watching kids draw anything they want with crayons: they get to theme and tweak games however they see fit.
As a volunteer organization, we can always use more teachers to help us spread Scratch to the masses. Our classes are free and offered to kids ages 8 to 14, and we do a simple game each week.
Re: MIT Scratch – Teach kids to program stories, games, and animations
#6Two things:
1) I have neither a computer science nor a teaching background. (I'm a self-taught web-dev hack) but I am interested in introducing local kids to programming. I helped run a couple Hour of Code sessions last week at my kids' elementary school, and I think I could get support there to start up some kind of after-school program. But I'm a bit lost as to what a good curriculum would look like. Anyone here have any pointers or suggestions?
2) I believe that Blockly (https://developers.google.com/blockly/) was the engine behind the Hour of Code exercise I used last week. It's available as a client-side library to include in your web applications, but I couldn't track down its license. It looks like, if one were to nail down a good curriculum, you could use Blockly to build a learning environment to accompany it.
Re: MIT Scratch – Teach kids to program stories, games, and animations
#7Two things: 1) I have neither a computer science nor a teaching background. (I'm a self-taught web-dev hack) but I am interested in introducing local kids to programming. I helped run a couple Hour of Code sessions last week at my kids' elementary school, and I think I could get support there to start up some kind of after-school program. But I'm a bit lost as to what a good curriculum would look like. Anyone here ha…
UC Berkeley's CS10 class teaches with Snap(a variant of Scratch) https://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs10/fa14/
You could get a good idea of curriculum there.
Re: MIT Scratch – Teach kids to program stories, games, and animations
#8Two things: 1) I have neither a computer science nor a teaching background. (I'm a self-taught web-dev hack) but I am interested in introducing local kids to programming. I helped run a couple Hour of Code sessions last week at my kids' elementary school, and I think I could get support there to start up some kind of after-school program. But I'm a bit lost as to what a good curriculum would look like. Anyone here ha…
(Member of the Scratch team here)
1) There's a super useful Scratch Curriculum guide - made by the folks from ScratchEd. http://scratched.gse.harvard.edu/resources/scratch-curriculu...
2) Blockly seems to be under the Apache license (https://github.com/google/blockly)
Re: MIT Scratch – Teach kids to program stories, games, and animations
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
I teach a game programming club for kids in grade 6-8 I'm split on scratch. On the surface it was easy to get the kids to engage, but I didn't really feel it led to much understanding of programming as a whole. And it did not seem to hold their attention for very long. I switched to C# XNA, with a good number of my own convenience libraries and boiler plates that allowed the kids to dig in and they haven't looked bac…
My son and I have been having some fun with Gosu ( https://github.com/jlnr/gosu ). No problems so far running it on Windows and Ubuntu.
How old did you start with your son?
Re: MIT Scratch – Teach kids to program stories, games, and animations
#10We use scratch and its clones phratch/snap/bingo at our local coderdojo to great effect. Today I discovered Dr Scratch http://drscratch.programamos.es which does an analysis on your code.
I teach a game programming club for kids in grade 6-8 I'm split on scratch. On the surface it was easy to get the kids to engage, but I didn't really feel it led to much understanding of programming as a whole. And it did not seem to hold their attention for very long. I switched to C# XNA, with a good number of my own convenience libraries and boiler plates that allowed the kids to dig in and they haven't looked bac…
I have had great experiences with Scratch, but I agree that it's not great for kids in middle school. My kids are just starting elementary, and they love it to death.
For middle-school and up kids I would unreservedly recommend Racket. The curriculum at http://htdp.org is far and away the best introduction to programming concepts I've ever seen.