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Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children

scratch.mit.edu

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Re: Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children

#311

Post by wffurr »

em-bee wrote: post #298
doctorwho42 wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just some pretext, I am quite experienced in LabView. One of the major issues with visual languages is not being able to find the right chunk. Yes there is a search feature, but if you don't know the right word to search you are doomed. In my time as a undergrad research assistant I was pumping out complex LabView code and VI's to control whole experiments. But I still would run into problems where I couldnt for the…

One of the major issues with visual languages is not being able to find the right chunk. Yes there is a search feature, but if you don't know the right word to search you are doomed how is that different from serching the right function or library in java or python or any other language? either you know what to search for or there is good documentation or you have to ask somewhere. i don't see how visual languages fa…

It sounds like the discoverability of the LabView “syntax” leaves much to be desired. Perhaps because it’s a proprietary tool used by lots of non programmers, the Google results seem to be really lacking. Much harder to find a top Stack Overflow answer. And the official documentation seems poorly structured.

Re: Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children

#312

Post by cgk »

em-bee wrote: post #223
JustinGarrison wrote: post #169

If you’re interested in what’s on the backend I interviewed one of the infrastructure engineers and talked about it here https://youtu.be/QrBztSqCmlk

why did you cut out the actual interview? i'd have been interested in that as well, and learn what you derived that whiteboard from.

Probably because I do terrible interviews :)

Re: Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children

#313

Post by asciii »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #198
asciii wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yikes... Scratch and Roblox conspiracy to create an army of child developers? :O

Please do not conflate Scratch and Roblox! Scratch is open source software created by a nonprofit foundation to promote education and creativity. Roblox exploits children for profit and I quite literally believe they are violating child labor laws.

> I quite literally believe they are violating child labor laws.

Couldn't agree more the more I learn about them.

Re: Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children

#314

Post by em-bee »

cgk wrote: post #312
em-bee wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why did you cut out the actual interview? i'd have been interested in that as well, and learn what you derived that whiteboard from.

Probably because I do terrible interviews :)

somehow i doubt that, judging from what you posted, it can't be that bad. don't be shy.

Re: Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children

#315

Post by cgk »

schneems wrote: post #250
cgk wrote: post #83

Full disclosure: Principal Software Engineer here on the Scratch backend... Scratch is not built to be a "teach your kid programming languages" system, it is based on the work and ideas of the Life Long Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab (the director of this group is Professor Mitch Resnick, the LEGO, Papert Professor of Learning Research). The Papert part is where the term Mindstorms comes from ( https://www.a…

Wow. Thanks for posting! I’m curious of your thoughts on other visual programming languages. Specifically LabVIEW. My first job out of college was at NI where they heavily use LabVIEW. Every engineer in my cohort thought that paradigm was going to take off and over a decade later, it clearly hasn’t. One large factor is cost and proprietary tech, but I’m surprised few outside of the hardware testing world even know su…

Thank you for the feedback!

I made use of LabVIEW around 2002-2005 and I liked it, working on systems to measure the length of fiber optics down to the femtosecond (it's amazing what you can do with differential wave form/phase analysis), which was then used to write custom C++ code to do these measurements in real-time at a millimeter wave interferometer, enabling the ability to do real-time adjustment to the sample phases for any fiber that was being heated/expanding in the sun.

LabVIEW allowed us to make a very quick demonstration of this as a working concept. Which illustrates what I believe is the most powerful thing about visual programming environments. They can excel at demonstrations and full working solutions without including the parts of computation that are social constructions (language syntax, data structure access and limitations, ...).

I am not convinced that the idea of a "killer language" will happen. While there is a through-line of abstraction heaped upon abstraction, I am unconvinced that these first 60 years of computation in society are going to be visibly recognizable another 60 years from now.

OR!

Linus Torvalds will invent a language that takes over everything, based on how git has consumed almost the entire space of source code management systems (a sociological phenomena/opinionated work flow process) and the success of GNU/Linux more generally.

Re: Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children

#316

Post by maweki »

em-bee wrote: post #299
maweki wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love alternative models of computation and the EV3 mindstorms language was very nice with a type system (including coercion rules) encoded in puzzle shapes, dataflow through "pipes", parallelism through diverging code paths. With the scratch language I'm not so sure. I feel it's just imperative programming where you can't make a syntax error. You can put strings where numbers go and the semantics is unclear. Parall…

Parallelism only works through events why is that a problem?

In terms of the EV3 language you could spin up Lego motors in parallel just by drawing two lines from the previous command instead of a single line. Threading in a very literal sense.

Scratch being event-driven is not bad in itself. But there is so much design space to be explored.

Re: Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children

#317

Post by cgk »

varun_ch wrote: post #128
cgk wrote: post #83

Full disclosure: Principal Software Engineer here on the Scratch backend... Scratch is not built to be a "teach your kid programming languages" system, it is based on the work and ideas of the Life Long Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab (the director of this group is Professor Mitch Resnick, the LEGO, Papert Professor of Learning Research). The Papert part is where the term Mindstorms comes from ( https://www.a…

Thank you for the amazing work you and the Scratch Team do. I want to second the comment that Scratch works. I'm 16 years old and I discovered Scratch when I was 7. Soon I will be starting my professional career (hopefully something in computer science/engineering/cybersecurity), and it's all thanks to Scratch and the amazing community you have fostered. I don't think I would have ever even considered computers as so…

Cheers!

This is the sort of feedback that makes me cry (in the good way). It was extremely rewarding to have MIT students show up at our group and talking about what effect Scratch had on them and how it helped them make their way to MIT.

Re: Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children

#318

Post by PaulHoule »

cgk wrote: post #83

Full disclosure: Principal Software Engineer here on the Scratch backend... Scratch is not built to be a "teach your kid programming languages" system, it is based on the work and ideas of the Life Long Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab (the director of this group is Professor Mitch Resnick, the LEGO, Papert Professor of Learning Research). The Papert part is where the term Mindstorms comes from ( https://www.a…

I think a lot of the troubles that people have learning things have to do with emotions and motivation. I don't know to what extent people conclude they are completely unmusical because music classes in school don't engage them, for instance, and you learn just to lip sync to avoid a confrontation.

At times when I was burned out from programming I found my interest was rekindle d with Scratch.

Re: Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children

#319

Post by PaulHoule »

batch12 wrote: post #304
mjb wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We build and support Scratch to provide creative tools for anyone to explore computation in a from that is relatable and has a low floor for understanding/entry. I love this philosophy. Computing is so much more than application development. It's a creative tool, and exploration tool, a tool for finding insight and exploring spaces. Giving people access to those tools without gatekeeping or accidental complexity is…

> and "BASIC mutilates programmers" lines of thinking have done so much damage to the way we, as an engineering community, think about the role of computation in society. I learned BASIC when I was about 7 years old by reading the books and banging out code. When I didnt have access to a computer, I wrote the code on paper and entered it later. I can say that it was very hard for me to wrap my head around the C style…

As a 10 year old reading BYTE magazine what seemed common to C, FORTH, and LISP was that one could add new "words" to the language. It was quite a while before I really got that there was a difference between functions, functions that take functions as arguments (or return values), and functions that take expressions as arguments (or return values.)

Re: Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children

#320

Post by RokCoder »

thesausageking wrote: post #101

My 8 yo loves Scratch. She's made over 30 apps with it and has had a great time. However, now that she's reached the limits of what it can do, I have been frustrated that there isn't a natural place for her to graduate to. And Scratch does get really limited quickly. There are unofficial forks like SheepTester's one which let you drop JavaScript into Scratch projects, but they're not easy to use. We've failed a few t…

I've been working towards addressing this by building a tool that bridges the gap between Scratch and Unity. Talking with Scratch Team members in the past, Unity has been cited as a good exit strategy. Unlike many other languages you aren't being dropped into a text-only environment. I think the main downside is the initial presentation of Unity can be a little daunting.

The tool I'm working on adds a new entry to the main Unity menu bar - "Scratch". Clicking on this allows you to enter the project ID of a Scratch project. Once done, the tool pulls the assets (graphics, sounds, etc) directly from the Scratch website as well as pulling the code and converting it to native C#. The idea behind this is that a student who is intermediate to high level at Scratch can import their favourite Scratch project over to Unity. They can look at the C# code to see the comparison, inspect and modify any of the assets, see the Unity components added to each Unity Game Object, etc. Basically it puts them in a position where they have a project that they have written in Scratch that they can no play in Unity. They can breakpoint the code and single step through it. Essentially it is designed to take away much of the initial impact of having to start from an empty canvas in Unity.

This is currently a WIP but I'm aiming to have a beta version ready within months. I made an early pre-beta video a while back to demonstrate it in action. You can view the video at https://youtu.be/nuUF9BcJT8g

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