Has anyone had experience teaching using this and Swift Playgrounds? Is there any comparison?
Scratch is a big deal
101–110 of 306 posts
Re: Scratch is a big deal
#102I 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…
>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 This, imo, is what makes Scratch a great education platform. It has a couple of very easy to use primitives (such as displaying and moving sprites) and leaves you to build whatever else you need by abstracting things on top of it. T…
This is also a good point. Scratch isn't designed to make coding easy so much as conceptually understandable.
Re: Scratch is a big deal
#103I 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.
One thing I really appreciate about visual programming languages, especially as I watch the sorts of challenges students encounters wrapping their heads around the concepts in programming, is that the development environment and the nature of the visual language make it very hard to build syntactically incorrect programs. In contrast, text-based languages sample from the sea of all possible strings of characters, and except a vastly tiny subset of that sea as valid input; the rest are just rejected programs.
I think there's a lot of meat on the bones of creating tools that make it structurally impossible to write statically invalid programs. Consider how much time the average developer consumes in a simple iterative process of writing a program, discovering they have made a simple syntax error, and correcting it. IDEs have come a long way in shortening that loop by providing interactive feedback that the current program is invalid, but if the static analysis rules of the language move all the way into the development tooling, you're compiler doesn't even need a static analysis step!
Re: Scratch is a big deal
#104The simplicity of the visual language that Scratch provides inherits from the simplicity of Lisp, via Logo. The Logo language (& the Mindstorms pedagogical philosophy), which is what Scratch builds off of in a visual way, was implemented as a dialect of Lisp.
From anecdotal experience, I do believe that the choice of a Lisp for Logo was an important criterion in the simplicity of the language, and thus the high impact of the learning impact.
I do think that if we find Scratch useful and powerful, then we should really re-/consider Clojure as an important language for real general purpose programming work, for many reasons: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3-53JoGPE4
Re: Scratch is a big deal
#105I love what they've done and how my kids have taken to it. The combination of design tools and code reminds me of the "golden age" of Flash in some ways. Vector graphics editor, sound editor, code, it all works together - this is pretty special to see in one tool that kids can use.
The games are actually getting quite good on the platform, and that means it's hard for a lot of parents to understand how much time is gaming vs. coding.
Re: Scratch is a big deal
#106I 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…
> 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 So if your kid is cool with this kind of clever workaround for the limitations of some piece of crap, you have a future software engineer.
This made me laugh! and then made me sad :’)
Re: Scratch is a big deal
#107Scratch was my introduction to programming. I was already a computer nerd, but had never programmed before. This was in the mid 2000s.
Now I'm in the industry and so are 15% of my classmates from that time.
Re: Scratch is a big deal
#108At work we built a BI tool around Scratch (Blockly) back in 2013. It’s still seeing daily use: https://www.dialogic.nl/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/demo1.gif
Cool! It's like a homebrewed alternative to Google Data Studio.
Re: Scratch is a big deal
#109One 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…
Warcraft 3's map editor scratched that itch for me! I'm so glad there are more accessible, and free, tools now.
Re: Scratch is a big deal
#110No post body was provided.