Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Scratch is a big deal

bryanbraun.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 306 posts

Re: Scratch is a big deal

#31

Post by kelseyfrog »

The annual variation shown in the graph immediately says tells me that a large portion of use is driven by academic forces. That can be a problem, but can also be an opportunity.

If the institutions driving Scratch adoption decide to switch away from Scratch, the community will be on much more unstable foundations. The opportunity here is finding non-education modes of engagement. Social engagements, viral engagements, or non-academic partnerships are all ways Scratch could strengthen its community.

Wishing them luck - it looks like this brings joy to a lot of kids.

Re: Scratch is a big deal

#33

Post by ksaj »

jmugan wrote: post #25

One problem I've seen with Scratch is that schools rely on it for too long. Kids get into high school and the school is still teaching with Scratch.

We definitely moved on faster than that back in the 80's. We started with LOGO (which some people know as Turtle Graphics) and BASIC, but pretty much immediately went into other historical languages (prolog, pascal, cobol) and then to C, within a single semester. And through all that, we were always presented with the binary code (in Hex) so we were fully aware of how registers and boolean math worked.

Re: Scratch is a big deal

#34

Post by spankalee »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #26
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".

We ended up redesigning the app to be better for "say" and "prompts", but our original design just had a couple of big number displays on the screen and a button - something he literally drew out first on paper. We had to basically fail at that before making it more text based.

Re: Scratch is a big deal

#35

Post by system16 »

Having already known how to code, I gave Scratch a shot after hearing about it. I know I'm not the target audience, but despite "looking" friendly I found it very complex and not very intuitive at all. If the goal is to ultimately learn programming with industry standard tools, I think the time would be better spent learning those tools and fundamentals rather than becoming comfortable with Scratch and trying to transition to them.

Re: Scratch is a big deal

#36

Post by kelseyfrog »

hirundo wrote: post #4

From a quick look it doesn't seem that the graphical elements are inherent to the language. It could be expressed in a text syntax, and with more or less difficultly other languages could get a similar graphical overlay. If the graphics are useful training wheels to new programmers of scratch, the same is probably true for the text languages. And from time to time even a super cyclist can find a use for training whee…

The same mixed media programming existing in the Lego Mindstorms platform when I was a kid.

A bunch of my peers where using the visual editor, but I took the plunge and learned NQC to do my programming. Having multiple paths available to users helped the platform and broadened its accessibility.

I'll never forget the instructor teaching me to always make sure my curly-braces matched up. :)

Re: Scratch is a big deal

#37

Post by ManuelKiessling »

I never find the time to dive into it, but for years I carry the thought that somewhere in the general direction of “take the visual programming module of Scratch and make it talk to a cleanly designed high-level API of our business application” lies the key for tremendous feature development productivity, at least for some kinds of features — where from then on, our Product Managers simply go like “oh I know, let’s just put this block into that IF block and thus add another step to the user registration”, without the need to use precious dev resources.

Re: Scratch is a big deal

#38

Post by jonplackett »

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…

QBASIC was also my intro to programming.

I think in a way it’s a shame that kids now first see visuals rather than code.

There’s something much more thrilling about seeing a bunch of written instructions become a game, than some sprites that already look a lot like the game start moving about.

Another awesome QBASIC feature - the help section taught you everything you ever needed to know to learn every feature.

Re: Scratch is a big deal

#39

Post by _int3_ »

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…

That's what I did also. I made explosions in Gorillas as I wanted them . I didn't know coding or language but somehow figured out if I change values here and there the explosion would be bigger.

Soon after that wrote program for deleting other programs. actually useful because we didn't know yet how to delete from DOS.

we were kids left with PC with no instructions at all. Parents were busy.

Now in hindsight I see my first steps were somewhat destructive.

Re: Scratch is a big deal

#40

Post by skaul »

ManuelKiessling wrote: post #37

I never find the time to dive into it, but for years I carry the thought that somewhere in the general direction of “take the visual programming module of Scratch and make it talk to a cleanly designed high-level API of our business application” lies the key for tremendous feature development productivity, at least for some kinds of features — where from then on, our Product Managers simply go like “oh I know, let’s…

I thought this was what MuleSoft was designed to be, though I haven't kept track of what it looks like now
Post reply on HN