I remember introducing a middle schooler to programming using Scratch at my highschool's open day. I had spent a few hours making a simple two player shooting game and a maze generator for the IT class display. Most kids just wanted to play the games, but seeing just one of them be genuinely excited about the possibility of creating his own interactive experiences, asking questions about how certain mechanics were implemented, what I did to get to this point, if I thought he would be able to create similar things, was really encouraging. Probably didn't make a difference in the long run, but still a treasured memory for me.
Scratch is a big deal
71–80 of 306 posts
Re: Scratch is a big deal
#72Scratch 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…
My lad has been learning Python in Replit. It looks like they are trying to introduce community feedback loops.
For making games, Roblox is perhaps a good choice. You can post a modded example game and get your friends playing it very quickly, then iterate rapidly.
Re: Scratch is a big deal
#73I 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…
> It's very, very difficult to do things as simple as display a number on screen. I suppose I might be missing something, but if you just care about displaying the number, rather than any particular styling, you can just show the variable, right?
Show the variable how? There's not a console, there's not a way to simply display a string or character. Scratch revolves around programming sprites to do things
Re: Scratch is a big deal
#74I didn't see anyone else mention it, but I think one contributing factor is the inclusion of Scratch on the Raspberry Pi, which until the past year or so has been one of the most affordable ways to get kids set up with a little computer for learning.
Many educational programs have a setup where each kid gets a Pi (well until recently since the past year they've been hard to get), and Scratch was the perfect companion since it didn't require a ton of RAM or a fast CPU to run well.
At this point though I see it come with a lot of other educational programs on Chromebooks, too. Since the sharing is over that MIT site, it's perfect for those "lite" computers that don't store anything local.
One interesting side effect of its popularity is that I've seen a number of kids who "know scratch" but don't really "program" anything with it. They just load up other people's programs and game with it, basically a Steam for Kids.
Re: Scratch is a big deal
#75Name another language where you can be productive on a mobile device.
Re: Scratch is a big deal
#76Unfortunately I think making "games, animations, stories" is not that big of a deal.
Even though it is nice to get kids into programming - it is not what business development will be.
Re: Scratch is a big deal
#77At work we built a BI tool around Scratch (Blockly) back in 2013. It’s still seeing daily use: https://www.dialogic.nl/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/demo1.gif
Re: Scratch is a big deal
#78My children did not like scratch (it is taught at school in France). They had much less problems to understand Python which seems more natural in the interactions (displaying things, especially).
They are unfortunately not interested in programming but when they have to do something at school they catch up with Python quickly. With scratch not that much.
Re: Scratch is a big deal
#79Curious as to the application of Scratch into enterprise software, specifically to develop low-code applications.
Re: Scratch is a big deal
#80> It was the community aspects that really drew in my kids. They would get really excited whenever somebody followed them or “loved” one of their projects. It gave them the motivation to build more ambitious things.
This is really what sparked my love of coding and, more broadly, creating things when I made projects in Scratch as a kid in the early 2010s. Seeing all of the positive feedback on stuff I posted as well as seeing the awesome stuff other people posted motivated me to keep one-upping myself with cooler and cooler projects. Those who downplay the positive effect Scratch can have on kids tend to overlook this part of the equation.