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Scratch is a big deal

bryanbraun.com

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Re: Scratch is a big deal

#21

Post by ModernMech »

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 from programming in their daily lives never pick it up again. Just as not everyone who can cook needs to be a chef with professional grade equipment to benefit from the activity, not everyone who programs needs to be a software developer with all the incidental complexity that entails.

We start teaching Java to kids as early as 8th/9th grade when the vast majority aren’t ready for it. Even my sophomore students in college regularly struggle with the language.

There’s a huge gap between scratch and Java that is begging to be filled by innovative language design. Or better yet, a language that can a student can stick with from early age all the way through adulthood. Imagine if students who started at 11 actually stuck with it through 18 and beyond, instead of giving up at 13/14. Scratch has a perception problem as being something exclusively for kids; I don’t know how it can shed that reputation.

We need to stop treating early childhood programming education as the first stage of the funnel into corporate tech jobs. Not everyone wants to end up there, and we shouldn’t design their education with that goal in mind. Programming literacy is too important in the 21st century to reserve the skill for would-be devs.

Re: Scratch is a big deal

#23

Post by tengbretson »

One of the coolest things about scratch that I've seen from using it and being an instructor is that it teaches the user how to work in event based systems. I've seen children with better intuitions for event based architectures than some veteran developers.

Re: Scratch is a big deal

#26

Post by Wowfunhappy »

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…

Did you try using the "Say" blocks? I know they don't look quite as nice, but this is what I use when I'm building something "text based".

Re: Scratch is a big deal

#27

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Scratch is a big deal

#28

Post by whimsicalism »

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.

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

Re: Scratch is a big deal

#29

Post by ksaj »

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/

I like how under the (more) menu, you can step through the code. It not only teaches kids how their code works, it also indirectly teaches them how a debugger works.

Where the trace shows, it would be even better if the variables could be edited, which brings it even closer to debugging, and also expands on how the program logic works.

Re: Scratch is a big deal

#30

Post by omnibrain »

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…

PICO-8 could be a next step. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PICO-8 A "real" programming language, but still focused on game making, all wrapped into a neat package.
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