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Scratch is a big deal

bryanbraun.com

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Re: Scratch is a big deal

#171

Post by wrycoder »

ModernMech wrote: post #21

Scratch is great, but the problem is: where do kids go after scratch? Often they are transitioned directly to professional-grade languages and developer tools, which has the effect of turning what was once fun to something scary and frustrating. Many kids stop their PL development right then and there, writing it off as something “not for me”. I find this sad, as it means a lot of people who might otherwise benefit f…

> Scratch is great, but the problem is: where do kids go after scratch?

Sadly, they often move on to real computing. They are taught how to use Word and Excel.

Re: Scratch is a big deal

#172

Post by whimsicalism »

bckr wrote: post #45
whimsicalism wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much of my coding was started with modifying the Minecraft & Wii internals and I would call that "modern software."

You're an outlier for sure. Wii internals sounds very hard.

Definitely harder than Minecraft as it was in C and also a more adversarial environment bc Nintendo made it very challenging

Re: Scratch is a big deal

#173

Post by SLWW »

Lego Mindstorms is probably the reason i got into programming.

Moved from using the visual editor as a kid to learning that I could use this weird language called "C"(?) to do even more complex things with a few sketchy libraries.

Amazing

Re: Scratch is a big deal

#174

Post by haunter »

Google Game Builder what I really like to use to teach because it’s using JS. Not that I used it many times but it’s really engaging and at least you interact with a “real” language.

It was killed by Google (ofc) but still available and works perfectly https://github.com/googlearchive/gamebuilder

The last full build (binary release) is here https://github.com/googlearchive/gamebuilder/tree/master/bui...

Here is the original trailer https://youtu.be/l9Mf_XEZq-A

And some of the tutorial videos are also available https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLuYHfxlxFzb25nWnevSN5wQVO...

Re: Scratch is a big deal

#175

Post by empressplay »

chkas wrote: post #13

For 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. https://easylang.online/ide/

Logo can also fill that gap, as it has for a very long time:

https://turtlespaces.org/weblogo/

Re: Scratch is a big deal

#176

Post by dzdt »

The great: Scratch has some hugely good things going for it. The community sharing model is ridiculously good. The ease of being able to jump in, put up a sprite and make it do something is super. It is so easy to go from kid-style ideas to something that happens on screen: "there is a castle, and a dragon, and it flies over and makes a noise...". They did a great job of making the sprite actors easy to use with a small number of programming blocks. The actor/message model is nice. Importing images and making them into objects is easy, and there is a big enough library of built-in actors to get you started.

The not-so-great: if you try to do something outside of the range of what Scratch really tried to make easy, it quickly gets hard. Moving 2d sprites around in simple patterns using built-in collision detection: peachy. Pretty much anything else: not so much. And as projects get large the block-based visual programming is a frustration. There is no text mode.

My wish: It would be great if someone would make a one-level-up version of scratch, with great community sharing features and sprite/object/message based library with super-easy graphics programming but text-based source code and with the ability for add-on libraries to be part of the ecosytem.

Re: Scratch is a big deal

#177

Post by dtagames »

spankalee wrote: post #15

I 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…

If I recall correctly, Scratch existed before Blockly, which was developed by Google. The excellent Microsoft MakeCode environment also uses Blockly and looks like Scratch with the important distinction that you can switch back and forth between blocks and Typescript anytime.

Even with that feature, there is no "UI" capability. Getting stuff on the screen still consists of putting up sprites with words over their heads! I ran into this while developing two games on the platform, like this one: Mathtown Alley[0]. It's a crippling limitation even for me, and I write TS professionally.

[0] https://arcade.makecode.com/59845-44370-91548-60605

Re: Scratch is a big deal

#178

Post by AviationAtom »

fillskills wrote: post #98
Retr0id wrote: post #60

A fun statistic is that Scratch now has over 100 million projects published by users on their website[1]. GitHub only reached 100m repos in 2018[2] - I can't find any more up-to-date numbers, but it's probably around 150m today. It's crazy to think that Scratch and GitHub operate on similar orders of magnitude. [1] https://scratch.mit.edu/statistics/ [2] https://github.blog/2018-11-08-100m-repos/

Maybe one of the reasons for sudden increase in the projects are companies such as Whitehat Jr. Whitehat incorporates and leverages Scratch in their lesson plans. For each lesson kids may be creating 1-3 Scratch programs. You can read more about Whitehat Jr, their approach to sales etc by doing a little googling. And am sure there are other companies who follow the same practice of leveraging Scratch in tutorials. (e…

Pretty sure they're owned by BYJU'S now, an Indian Edutech firm. Lookup some of the horrible reviews about how they run business.

Re: Scratch is a big deal

#179

Post by dtagames »

falcor84 wrote: post #19
spankalee wrote: post #15

I 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?

You cannot. A sprite can "say" a value by showing it near them, bit that's it. There's no place to write anything or create a UI, hence the complaint.

Re: Scratch is a big deal

#180

Post by quickthrower2 »

ryukafalz wrote: post #3
jawns wrote: post #2

One 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…

This is something that I think is extremely under-appreciated: the ability of a user to dive into the code of what they’re using and try things out. Like the type-in games of the 8-bit micro era, or like Scratch, or like Emacs; each of these allows the user to tinker with little overhead. Modern software, by contrast, is usually too opaque - even free software! The barrier to entry is way too high.

The browser lets you do this interactively with a web page too in console tools.
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