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Scratch is a big deal

bryanbraun.com

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Re: Scratch is a big deal

#211

Post by andrewstuart »

hmahncke wrote: post #191

A lot of discussion here about the limitations of Scratch as a programming language. But the magic of Scratch is the community. My daughter learned Scratch, and she joined multiple teams of 10-year olds making all kind of interactive stories and games. And virtually every interaction she had was positive, uplifting, and helped her construct her identity as a programmer. She now teaches Scratch for kids and programs i…

Whilst I totally agree with you, on the other hand, a child's first introduction to programming should be easy, intuitive and powerful.

What could be worse than an introduction to programming that puts a certain number of children off because it's not those things?

Clearly alot of kids manage to drive it enough to their satisfaction, but the failings of Scratch must leave many children behind.

I know my son gave Scratch a go and gave up.

Re: Scratch is a big deal

#212

Post by normac2 »

hmahncke wrote: post #191

A lot of discussion here about the limitations of Scratch as a programming language. But the magic of Scratch is the community. My daughter learned Scratch, and she joined multiple teams of 10-year olds making all kind of interactive stories and games. And virtually every interaction she had was positive, uplifting, and helped her construct her identity as a programmer. She now teaches Scratch for kids and programs i…

I've heard the exact opposite, that the online community is toxic and one of the main downsides.

I assume both are true in different cases, and you just have to be careful what part of the community you get involved in.

Re: Scratch is a big deal

#213

Post by twobitshifter »

avgcorrection wrote: post #113
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…

Displaying a number sounds like some hello world popup exercise that you would do in Rust or Go. I don’t see why one not just jump right to the game-making, which Scratch is good at. > 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…

look at the taco burp game. There’s a scope there, hence ya need numbers.

Re: Scratch is a big deal

#214

Post by glenngillen »

kazinator wrote: post #62
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…

> 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.

Exactly! I think the value of these programming environments is in helping you find new ways to think about problems. Having constraints/limitations can be one way to force that creative rethinking to happen sooner rather than later. Obviously you need to find a good balance though as causing frustration and helplessness would have the opposite effect.

I’ve an anecdote of my own that I still think about semi-regularly:

I was volunteering at a school for a year or so helping them teach 9-11 year olds Scratch. Most of the kids spent the term trying to move sprites across a canvas and making basic platformer style games. It was a heap of fun while also challenging at times.

One day one of the students grabbed my attention and asked for some help making something work. She’d decided to build a trivia game, and was having an issue working out how to make the text for the previous question disappear. When I looked at what she’d built I was blown away. She’d basically built a fully recursive function in Scratch that would iterate through a collection of questions & answers. It was built almost exactly like I’d expect a professional developer to build something. A simple reusable function. I didn’t teach that. She’d never used Scratch before. She’d not done any programming before. It was just the most intuitive way for her to do it.

Re: Scratch is a big deal

#215

Post by GranPC »

whimsicalism wrote: post #170
messe wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I remember correctly the early days were painful as well, with it being necessary to manually unpack the jar file, and work with deobfuscated decompiled code. I'm not sure what the state of it is nowadays, but I hope its more pleasant. My favourite game from a modding perspective is Kerbal Space Program. Just drop a Mono/.NET DLL into its GameData folder and you're good to go, and code completion works automatical…

I remember having to unpack the jar but I don't remember the function names being obfuscated or anything like that. Then again, this was a while ago.

As far as I know, they've been obfuscated since, at the very least, the initial alpha release of survival mode netplay, back in 2010 or so.

Re: Scratch is a big deal

#216

Post by dpcan »

“ Most importantly, browsing projects shows you what’s possible. A kid begins by playing games, starts to get curious, and next thing you know, they’re changing the code to give themselves extra lives.”

Gorillas.bas anyone?

My programming life started the same way about 30 years ago.

I love to hear this is still happening.

Re: Scratch is a big deal

#217

Post by BenHerbst »

tmaly wrote: post #208
Sirened wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

I just think there are so many other forms of distraction today. Young kids are carrying around cell phones, texting their friends. It’s that or they are doing something on Tiktok. They don’t have time to hack like that anymore.

Yes true for most people ( I am 13, Started programming in Java with 10 ) but some also do this other stuff. Like I installed ubports on my second phone today ( Writing this on it )

Re: Scratch is a big deal

#218

Post by xcambar »

seldomI wrote: post #130
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…

Shameless plug: we're running a Scratch-like site, but for terminal programs (among other runtimes). A number guessing game is one of our example programs. It's about 20 statement blocks: https://app.code-it-studio.de/project/303

Vert Nice!

Re: Scratch is a big deal

#219

Post by simplify »

modernerd wrote: post #56

Is there a reason that visual programming languages haven’t taken off for professional programming? I know of several for specific fields (Dark for backends, TouchDesigner for live graphics/multimedia), but none that are more generalised, open, or in wide use. It feels like an underdeveloped area that’s ripe for exploration and experimentation.

Darklang is getting there. Functionality is limited, but feels great to use. Speaking as someone with 15 years experience. Can't wait for it to mature.

Re: Scratch is a big deal

#220

Post by lolinder »

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…

I've always thought that number-guessing games were a first choice for introductory coding primarily because they're well suited to the standard library of most programming languages. Once you have standard I/O, you can write a number-guessing game.

Scratch has different constraints than most languages, but I don't view that as a bad thing. Scratch takes what is normally a huge undertaking--sprites--and makes them as much a first-class primitive as stdin/stdout are in most languages. Yeah, this makes the number-guessing and text-adventure games we usually use as teaching projects harder, but it makes it a lot quicker to build visual games. I don't think Scratch needs to change, I think we need to recognize that kids in this generation won't be building the same starter projects that we did growing up.

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