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MIT's Scratch Team releases Scratch 2.0 editor and player as open source

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Re: MIT's Scratch Team releases Scratch 2.0 editor and player as open source

#31

ISTR Scratch being available as a standalone executable, and then changing into a web app. The standalone tool made it easy to let my kid play around with while not having the whole internet there to distract him. Is the standalone app still available?

Presumably there's a way to use the app without having access to the entire Internet, especially considering this is a link to the source code.

Re: MIT's Scratch Team releases Scratch 2.0 editor and player as open source

#33
post #23

Catroid is another cool related project https://github.com/Catrobat/Catroid

This is great. Every time I visited the Scratch website I wished I could use a similar project on a tablet/smartphone.

They are making a tablet version of Scratch aimed at 5-7 year old kids. Out this summer....

http://www.scratchjr.org/

Re: MIT's Scratch Team releases Scratch 2.0 editor and player as open source

#34
post #18

I've taught a few kids using Scratch and it works quite well. I'm happy to hear they're working on an HTML5 version, and hopefully it will be possible to install if offline like the current Adobe AIR version does. I teach with a few netbooks running Ubuntu, and can't always rely on having internet, so I had to install the last version of AIR that supported Linux to get it working. There is also an unaffiliated app fo…

As I mentioned below, they are making a tablet version of Scratch aimed at 5-7 year old kids. Out this summer....

http://www.scratchjr.org/

Re: MIT's Scratch Team releases Scratch 2.0 editor and player as open source

#35

It's unfortunate that Scratch is built upon the Flash platform. Though Scratch has been released under the GPL, it requires nonfree software in order to run. Scratch looks interesting, but I cannot recommend its use until this problem is fixed.

Google's Blockly is similar and available under the Apache License:

"Blockly is a component that may be useful for a variety of projects, including educational tools. We want developers to be able to play with Blockly, give feedback, and think of novel uses for it. All the code is free and open source."

https://code.google.com/p/blockly/source/browse/trunk/COPYIN...

Re: MIT's Scratch Team releases Scratch 2.0 editor and player as open source

#36

Scratch is great for making animated comics. It appeals to girls as well as boys. I taught kids from 6 to 12 years last year. Kids older than that got bored with it. Highly recommended.

I'm 16, and I still use Scratch from time to time. It is well suited to creating simple 2D games, although it is not efficient enough for anything particulary complex.

Re: MIT's Scratch Team releases Scratch 2.0 editor and player as open source

#37
We love and use Scratch a lot at Coding Goûter events. Recently we also started to use the HTML-based SNAP![1] that also has the advantage to let older kids create their own custom blocks (functions). It's open source, and seems to be evolving fast. (It started as a clone of scratch, but might diverge in the future if I understand the conversations right) [1]http://snap.berkeley.edu/

Re: MIT's Scratch Team releases Scratch 2.0 editor and player as open source

#39

It's unfortunate that Scratch is built upon the Flash platform. Though Scratch has been released under the GPL, it requires nonfree software in order to run. Scratch looks interesting, but I cannot recommend its use until this problem is fixed.

I think it's more important for kids to learn to code, that it is to be consistent about using non-free software.

Scratch is free, committed to open source, and is frankly the best software out there for getting young kids excited about coding.

I'd highly recommend it, despite being encumbered by flash.

Re: MIT's Scratch Team releases Scratch 2.0 editor and player as open source

#40

Scratch is great for making animated comics. It appeals to girls as well as boys. I taught kids from 6 to 12 years last year. Kids older than that got bored with it. Highly recommended.

Agreed - I think you can get a lot of kids who might otherwise be turned off the idea of 'programming' by promoting Scratch classes as 'animation' classes.

My son's elementary school held a series of scratch programming classes; the turnout was over 90% male. That seems like a shame to me.

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