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Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children

scratch.mit.edu

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Re: Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children

#111

Post by efitz »

ksab wrote: post #28

My 4 year old made his first program using Scratch Jr. What was this program? He made a story where cats jump up and down 25 times and then walk away. He recorded sound effects for the cats that repeated as the cats jump. It’s simple but offers so much more of a creative outlet than games/educational apps aimed at his age group.

I bought a subscription to CodeSpark Academy and my kid has spent literally hundreds of hours on it over the last few years. He’s 9 now but started at 5 or 6. It allows him to do exactly the kind of things you describe- simple animations with kid-provided sound effects, a simple visual building block programming language, etc. I think that the key advantage of these types of systems is that they allow kids to do things that kids like (animated cats, poop noises, whatever) right off the bat. Getting enough python skill to do these kinds of things would take many hours of learning.

Re: Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children

#112

Post by khochesh_kushat »

distcs wrote: post #105

Not a Scratch user. Also not a child here. A grown up software programmer. But I did try Scratch and I could not make much sense of it. Maybe I am missing something. So read this comment as a request for help. The last time I tried, I remember I had to drag and drop building blocks available as tiles. Some tiles made the character turn right. Some tiles did something else. Some implemented conditionals. Am I remember…

It's possible you were playing Scratch Jr, it sounds a bit like it.

Re: Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children

#113

Post by Wowfunhappy »

Retr0id wrote: post #52

They're selling it short - it's the largest coding community full stop. "As of 15 February, 2023, community statistics on the language's official website show more than 123 million projects shared by over 103 million users, over 804 million total projects"[1] Compare to GitHub: "As of January 2023, GitHub reported having over 100 million developers and more than 372 million repositories"[2] Of course, the average Scr…

Every time you open a new instance of the Scratch editor, Scratch saves it as a new project. It's still a huge number but a bit skewed compared to e.g. Github.

Re: Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children

#114

Post by ksab »

meterplech wrote: post #75
ksab wrote: post #28

My 4 year old made his first program using Scratch Jr. What was this program? He made a story where cats jump up and down 25 times and then walk away. He recorded sound effects for the cats that repeated as the cats jump. It’s simple but offers so much more of a creative outlet than games/educational apps aimed at his age group.

This is really cool. Out of curiosity - how did you actually set this up for him to use? Was it on tablet or a computer or phone? Any suggestions for a dad of a 3.5 year old? Also, is he reading / at what level? Trying to get a feel for when I can introduce it to him.

We’re using an iPad. It’s theoretically aimed at older children (5+) but my son was able to pick it up no problem.

I sat down with mine about 6 months ago (he was 3.75 at the time) and we learned what each of the blocks did and how to combine them.

Now he asks to make a program and can do it independently.

He experiments with the backgrounds, sound effects, loops and motion.

My son can read but knowing how to count/recognize numbers is more important in this interface. Everything is graphical. Loops require a number input.

Another toy aimed at older children that younger ones can play with is snap circuits. We introduced the toy at 3. He can copy the project schematic and build the project. He built the AM radio project independently.

Re: Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children

#115

Post by Kon-Peki »

khochesh_kushat wrote: post #44
bastardoperator wrote: post #34

Can you run scratch locally?

Yes: https://scratch.mit.edu/download/

My kids got started with Scratch 1.4 on a Raspberry Pi. That's as far as we've gone with it. Scratch 2 was a lost cause from the start, and Scratch 3 leans way too hard into the "community" aspect of it. It's really too bad.

Re: Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children

#116

Post by hoherd »

distcs wrote: post #105

Not a Scratch user. Also not a child here. A grown up software programmer. But I did try Scratch and I could not make much sense of it. Maybe I am missing something. So read this comment as a request for help. The last time I tried, I remember I had to drag and drop building blocks available as tiles. Some tiles made the character turn right. Some tiles did something else. Some implemented conditionals. Am I remember…

It's a lot more than that. People do ray tracing with scratch. https://scratch.mit.edu/users/Raytracing/

Re: Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children

#117

Post by khochesh_kushat »

roland35 wrote: post #61

I love that my son enjoys scratch, but I wish there was some way to have parental controls on the social aspects of it! I am a little uncomfortable with the fact that random users have messaged my son and there really isn't anything I can do besides periodically logging in myself

You can use the local version instead, maybe.

Re: Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children

#118

Post by TeMPOraL »

Retr0id wrote: post #84
__mharrison__ wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure Excel is the largest coding group in the world, they just don't share their code in Github.

"Community" being the key word.

All Microsoft needs to do here is to include a stripped down IM inside Excel, a blend between MS Teams and Chatroulette, but with a twist: it will upload what you're working on to Bing to take a look at, group you with others whose Excel sheets are closest to your in the latent space, and connect you all in a group chat.

Like magic, fluid, self-associative communities.

Re: Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children

#119

Post by knicholes »

cyrialize wrote: post #39
photochemsyn wrote: post #30

I'd imagine learning at least a little Python alongside Scratch would be more optimal than Scratch alone. It's like bilingual education, it has great benefits although individuals may gravitate towards a preferred option. Perhaps it's a bit like comparing Minecraft to Factorio: https://www.idtech.com/blog/scratch-vs-python Looking around, it also seems possible to set up your own Scratch server, which is comparable t…

Other platforms similar to Scratch actually teach Python! They start off with drag and drop coding and then Python. The Python is actually pretty fun, you write code to make animals move around and get stars.

It's almost as if Python was designed to make it easy for kids to learn how to program.

Re: Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children

#120

Post by RRWagner »

thesausageking wrote: post #101

My 8 yo loves Scratch. She's made over 30 apps with it and has had a great time. However, now that she's reached the limits of what it can do, I have been frustrated that there isn't a natural place for her to graduate to. And Scratch does get really limited quickly. There are unofficial forks like SheepTester's one which let you drop JavaScript into Scratch projects, but they're not easy to use. We've failed a few t…

Maybe this: https://snap.berkeley.edu/
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