College student here. Scratch was my first real introduction to programming. It's an amazing tool, and a great way to get anybody started with programming
Scratch is a big deal
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Re: Scratch is a big deal
#12One of my earliest memories of writing code was playing Gorillas, a QBASIC game, on my school's PC in the early 90s. My friends and I would tweak the source code to make the gravity stronger or weaker, or make other interesting mods to the projectiles. For me, it was a perfect introduction, because there was an already written, already playable program, and I could dive into the code little by little and explore. Scr…
Can you share some here? I’m about to get my 3 year old into Scratch, since it’s already on his RPi. I remember doing the exact same thing in grade school with Gorillas and QBASIC. I actually want to download it now and play it again.
You can play it in your browser right now: https://archive.org/details/GorillasQbasic
Re: Scratch is a big deal
#13For beginners up to about 12 years old, Scratch is optimal. For older ones I think a text-based language is better. In the past, that was BASIC. Today it can be Python, with which beginners have some problems in my experience. And now comes the shameless self-promotion: I have developed something that can fill this gap. By the way, it is open source.
Re: Scratch is a big deal
#14One of my earliest memories of writing code was playing Gorillas, a QBASIC game, on my school's PC in the early 90s. My friends and I would tweak the source code to make the gravity stronger or weaker, or make other interesting mods to the projectiles. For me, it was a perfect introduction, because there was an already written, already playable program, and I could dive into the code little by little and explore. Scr…
Can you share some here? I’m about to get my 3 year old into Scratch, since it’s already on his RPi. I remember doing the exact same thing in grade school with Gorillas and QBASIC. I actually want to download it now and play it again.
Can he read yet?
Re: Scratch is a big deal
#15I like Scratch - my kid uses it and I worked briefly with the guy who made Blockly, the underlying visual programming toolkit - but the programming environment makes many things far too complicated with its singular focus on sprites.
It's very, very difficult to do things as simple as display a number on screen. My 7yo was making a number guessing game, and to display a two-digit number we had to make two sprites that had 10 "costumes" (0-9) then do modular math to select the costume for each digit. Sprites also have their own code, and if you duplicate one and edit the code the edits don't apply to the duplicate - so there's no user library or abstraction power at all.
This made dealing with Scratch far more complex and time-consuming than the logic of the game my kid was making, which is the exact opposite of what you want in a learning environment. I don't really want to focus on the idiosyncrasies of Scratch when teaching programming.
Some simple text and drawing commands, user-defined functions, and a library would go a huge way towards making Scratch simpler. There are some other Blockly-based environments that may have this... but they're not as popular.
Re: Scratch is a big deal
#16I have yet to see a visual programming language that looks any easier than something like JS or Python, Scratch is no exception.
I still think Scratch’s interactive environment is impressive.
Re: Scratch is a big deal
#17FYI There is a free online Scratch Conference July 21, 2022 https://www.scratchfoundation.org/scratch-conference
Oh wow, great find! Gonna put this on the calendar.
That "Hacking apps with Makey Makey & Scratch" session looks particularly interesting.
Re: Scratch is a big deal
#18I use it for creating interactive Xmas cards!
Re: Scratch is a big deal
#19I like Scratch - my kid uses it and I worked briefly with the guy who made Blockly, the underlying visual programming toolkit - but the programming environment makes many things far too complicated with its singular focus on sprites. It's very, very difficult to do things as simple as display a number on screen. My 7yo was making a number guessing game, and to display a two-digit number we had to make two sprites tha…
> It's very, very difficult to do things as simple as display a number on screen.
I suppose I might be missing something, but if you just care about displaying the number, rather than any particular styling, you can just show the variable, right?
Re: Scratch is a big deal
#20One of my earliest memories of writing code was playing Gorillas, a QBASIC game, on my school's PC in the early 90s. My friends and I would tweak the source code to make the gravity stronger or weaker, or make other interesting mods to the projectiles. For me, it was a perfect introduction, because there was an already written, already playable program, and I could dive into the code little by little and explore. Scr…
That brings back some very fond memories. Another game included in MS-DOS was Nibbles. I still remember wrapping my head around how Nibbles worked, as the source code didn't seem to fit the actual logic being run. It just looked way too short and simple. That's before I discovered how to view the source code of functions in QBasic. Then it clicked.
The Internet Archive has these games available to play by the way: