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MIT Scratch – Teach kids to program stories, games, and animations

scratch.mit.edu

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Re: MIT Scratch – Teach kids to program stories, games, and animations

#11

Post by codecurve »

Scratch was my introduction to programming, around 6 years ago. Since then, I've graduated with a degree in CS and co-founded a successful (and growing) software-house startup. Without having discovered Scratch, I'm not sure I would have decided to do Computing at A-level. No A-level, No CS degree. No degree, no startup.

In my case, it was the perfect way to learn about some of the important principles that underpin programming, without necessarily realising that it was happening. Scratch just allowed me to be creative with ideas for simple games. You can take away a lot of the cornerstones of imperative programming (loops, variables, booleans, conditionals) but also evented programming concepts; which will make sense straight away in a language like Javascript.

My father is a Head Teacher at a primary school in the UK and has introduced it into the ICT curriculum to great effect. There are primary age children (Overall, I think it's a fundamental stepping stone that children should have the chance to try at school. It represents the opportunity to find out whether you enjoy programming. Until I picked it up, it had never crossed my mind that I might.

Hats off to the Scratch team!

Re: MIT Scratch – Teach kids to program stories, games, and animations

#13

Post by hardmath123 »

sdg1 wrote: post #8
saturdayplace wrote: post #6

Two 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 )

(5-year Scratch veteran here.)

Even though Blockly (and it's predecessor, "App Inventor") is made by Google (the great and the powerful), I have to say, I would rather be introduced to code by Scratch than by Blockly. Scratch is much simpler-looking, it has a beautiful interface, and (most importantly) it has one of the friendliest communities in case you need help or want to show off a project.

Re: MIT Scratch – Teach kids to program stories, games, and animations

#14

Post by hardmath123 »

sankethkatta wrote: post #7
saturdayplace wrote: post #6

Two 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.

In particular, they use the BJC (Beauty and Joy of Computing) curriculum (http://bjc.berkeley.edu).

Re: MIT Scratch – Teach kids to program stories, games, and animations

#16

Post by thunderbong »

VonGuard wrote: post #5

We 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 spri…

I'm also looking at using Scratch in a school curriculum starting with children from grade 4 through grade 6. Are there any course ware, workbooks available for those grades?

How old are the children in your class?

Can you give any other suggestions about other programming languages that can be used as kids grow older?

Re: MIT Scratch – Teach kids to program stories, games, and animations

#18

Post by ChristerNilsson »

DLarsen wrote: post #4
deeviant wrote: post #3

Earlier 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.

Gosu is good, and Chingu on top of that is even better. https://github.com/ippa/chingu

Re: MIT Scratch – Teach kids to program stories, games, and animations

#20

Post by waimate01 »

thunderbong wrote: post #16
VonGuard wrote: post #5

We 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 spri…

I'm also looking at using Scratch in a school curriculum starting with children from grade 4 through grade 6. Are there any course ware, workbooks available for those grades? How old are the children in your class? Can you give any other suggestions about other programming languages that can be used as kids grow older?

Scratch is totally awesome, but the huge conundrum has always been where to go "after Scratch". Python isn't it, because its too textural and you can't easily share graphical games unless the recipient also has pyGame installed. Javascript hasn't been it for a lack of appropriate on-ramp, and many of the available resources (eg, CodeAcademy) are too vocationally-based and lack the fun of Scratch.

But there's now a free online tutorial system aimed at "Scratch kids" who want to take the next step. http://s2js.com -- tutors kids through the bits of Javascript they need to know in order to write graphical games that'll run on their smartdevices. It's tutorial, simple development tool, private image storage, and deployment facility all in one.

It's "Javascript as told to Scratchers", and the goal is to provide a bridge that gets them from the delights of Scratch, onto something else that will take them on their journey. S2JS isn't the destination, it's the "enthusiasm transfer tool".

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