Kids do program – Experiences from the course
1–10 of 45 posts
Re: Kids do program – Experiences from the course
#2Scratch is right now my 6yo's favorite toy. It beats the Lego robot because you don't have to worry about having the right parts and you can concentrate on the "fun parts," that is programming.
What really amazes me was how different the progression looked from what I was expecting. The move from "the dinosaur moves and that is fun" to fully fleshed mini games took me by surprise. No linearity there.
What I really appreciate about Scratch is how you can use the system without having to understand big parts of it. For example, one of the most complicated parts is the sprite editor (which does both vector and raster graphics). However, there's a huge library of sprites, so it's not a problem. You'll only have to learn the editor when your ambitions grow and you want custom sprites.
Another curious thing is that Scratch encourages concurrent code right off the bat (every script runs in their own thread). My son is coming up with rather elegant patterns which are nevertheless quite different from my intuition, like controlling the sprite's horizontal and vertical movement in separate scripts – which actually gives you easier to understand code.
Finally, there's a social aspect – discovering programs written by other kids and analyzing their code, and remixing them for your own projects. My son is a great fan of "Kimberly from Canada" who did a lot of "cook your own pizza" type of games, which have been a big inspiration.
Re: Kids do program – Experiences from the course
#3Their postures are awful. They will have myopia and damaged spine soon.
Re: Kids do program – Experiences from the course
#4Thank you for posting this, I also volunteer in a local school running a Code Club. I would be very much interested to know how you handle differences in age group. I sometimes struggle as the group ranges in age from 4/5 yo to 11 yo. Finding suitable material that can be approachable for all is nigh on impossible and being only one individual I do not have the capacity to have multiple courses running in the same hour.
Re: Kids do program – Experiences from the course
#5I've personally never been a fan of drag/drop puzzle-piece coding things like Scratch for teaching programming to kids. It just seems like it's sending them down this dead end path.
It took me a long time to find something better, and I've finally settled on Pico-8. It's the perfect combination of a simplified language that you have to actually type out in a stripped down editor, but with built in sprite and sound-effect tools and game loop methods that you can use to quickly get up and running with an actual 2d game.
It gets right to the heart of the great learning machines from the 80s (Apple ][, C64, TRS-80, Atari 400), but somehow fills in all the bits we've nostalgically romanticized over that would have made those machines a bad choice for kids today. Definitely check it out if you're thinking of getting your kids into programming:
Re: Kids do program – Experiences from the course
#6I've personally never been a fan of drag/drop puzzle-piece coding things like Scratch for teaching programming to kids. It just seems like it's sending them down this dead end path. It took me a long time to find something better, and I've finally settled on Pico-8. It's the perfect combination of a simplified language that you have to actually type out in a stripped down editor, but with built in sprite and sound-ef…
Can you say something about your child's experience using Pico-8?
Re: Kids do program – Experiences from the course
#7Anyone know why Scratch lite is so limited on the iOS? My 2 year old has nearly mastered all the features but I'm hesitant to let him loose on a laptop.
Re: Kids do program – Experiences from the course
#8Thank you for posting this, I also volunteer in a local school running a Code Club. I would be very much interested to know how you handle differences in age group. I sometimes struggle as the group ranges in age from 4/5 yo to 11 yo. Finding suitable material that can be approachable for all is nigh on impossible and being only one individual I do not have the capacity to have multiple courses running in the same ho…
Wow that is a giant difference, especially in cognitive capacity. I.e. by 11 you should be able to understand more or less anything (i.e. including abstraction, recursion, e.t.c) ... but a 5 yo might just be comprehending the number-symbol/object-count correspondence.
you could try to approach with a single theme? I.e. I heard from talk by Felienne Hermans, that her code club used alot of sprites/images from the Donald Duck comics, as everybody was reading that, and then you could scale by ability?
I.e. younger kids could do just animations, older kids interactions?
Re: Kids do program – Experiences from the course
#9I've personally never been a fan of drag/drop puzzle-piece coding things like Scratch for teaching programming to kids. It just seems like it's sending them down this dead end path. It took me a long time to find something better, and I've finally settled on Pico-8. It's the perfect combination of a simplified language that you have to actually type out in a stripped down editor, but with built in sprite and sound-ef…
It's not a dead end path, it's not far from how Unity works (of course you may consider Unity a dead end path).
I think your stance is needlessly puritan. At some point, the program has to actually do something and put it on the screen. Whether that is printing lines of text or moving a colorful sprite in some way is really not that different, except one is a lot more appealing to a young learner.
Re: Kids do program – Experiences from the course
#10I've personally never been a fan of drag/drop puzzle-piece coding things like Scratch for teaching programming to kids. It just seems like it's sending them down this dead end path. It took me a long time to find something better, and I've finally settled on Pico-8. It's the perfect combination of a simplified language that you have to actually type out in a stripped down editor, but with built in sprite and sound-ef…
QBasic's loss should be deeply mourned. Say what you will about it, it was almost the perfect beginner's environment. Simple, english-like syntax, good built-in documentation, support for graphics and sound right out of the box, and an IDE with a debugger.