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Scratch is a big deal

bryanbraun.com

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Re: Scratch is a big deal

#51

Post by bckr »

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…

A few ideas:

* Processing

* Love2D

* Unity / Godot

* Pygame

In the past, Flash filled this niche, I think (although I never programmed in it). Looking at my own list above, and others' responses, I don't think this niche has truly been filled, alas.

Maybe a startup idea?

Re: Scratch is a big deal

#52

Post by Wowfunhappy »

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…

> 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 work at a company that runs coding classes for children.

We created https://woofjs.com/ explicitly for the purpose of transitioning students from Scratch to a text based language. It's not perfect, but worth a look!

Re: Scratch is a big deal

#53

Post by bryanbraun »

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…

I wonder if there's a way to smooth out the transition into modding "real" games that teenagers are already playing with their friends. I'll bet it would be pretty motivating to have that kind of power in these online spaces where a bunch of your friends hang out.

Minecraft and Roblox support mods written in Java and Lua respectively but it's a pretty big leap from Scratch to Minecraft mods.

I was recently discovered a dedicated editor for Minecraft modding (https://bridge-core.app) and that seems pretty cool. A lot more could be done in this space though.

Re: Scratch is a big deal

#54

Post by easrng »

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…

There's http://tosh.blob.codes/ but it hasn't been updated in a while. (It generates Scratch 2 projects but they can still be imported into Scratch 3)

Re: Scratch is a big deal

#55

Post by jms429 »

As a former computing teacher, I loved Scratch. I remember reading about it on a Thursday evening on Slashdot, maybe spring of '08, or 09.

I had a free lesson first thing the next day, so I installed it on the network then had a class of 10 year olds give it a whirl. Had a full scheme of work written by the Monday, and was demoing it to other schools by the summer.

Loved it, loved the scratch board addon hardware, loved the complimentary "makey makey" project, and the cards, and the books and on and on.

incredible project.

Re: Scratch is a big deal

#56

Post by modernerd »

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.

Re: Scratch is a big deal

#57

Post by conradev »

> 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.

This is actually the driver for a lot of kids to learn programming. Neopets and Myspace allowed you to customize your profile with HTML, Minecraft allows you to make mods in Java, Roblox has an entire game studio that leverages Lua. Kids see something they want to be able to do, and they do it!

The steepness of the learning curve does matter, but searching "how to make a roblox game" into YouTube goes quite a long ways these days

Re: Scratch is a big deal

#59

Post by porcc »

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.

Probably it's just a hard problem. Max for Live is a bit more general purpose than TD but still has its limitations I'd imagine. Enso lang is the best attempt I've seen for this: https://enso.org/

Re: Scratch is a big deal

#60

Post by Retr0id »

A fun statistic is that Scratch now has over 100 million projects published by users on their website[1].

GitHub only reached 100m repos in 2018[2] - I can't find any more up-to-date numbers, but it's probably around 150m today.

It's crazy to think that Scratch and GitHub operate on similar orders of magnitude.

[1] https://scratch.mit.edu/statistics/

[2] https://github.blog/2018-11-08-100m-repos/

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