Scratch is probably the answer | Hacker News Reader

Scratch is probably the answer

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58 pointsdavidgerard27 comments

I've only used Scratch a little, but I must admit I found the interface fairly complex and arbitrary, somewhat reminiscent of the complexity and arbitrariness of normal programming syntaxes. As simple a thing as putting one new instruction in between two existing instructions can be a multi-stepped process, creating temporary intermediate structures that work better. But admittedly I didn't power through (or rather, power through with the kid) to the other side, so it might have ultimately been simpler than textual syntax, even if it's not actually easy.

Hopscotch, an iOS app basically like Scratch (https://www.gethopscotch.com/), seemed significantly better in this respect. The quality of your draggable UI matters quite a bit in a graphical language! Given how few of these languages exist, maybe it's not the model but just a lack of rigor applied to the UI challenges of the model.

(original poster here)

I like that Scratch has passed actual user testing amongst small children.

When school is back in (it's summer holidays here in the UK) I must enquire with the head of maths as to how it worked with the average kids, not just the bright ones.

Another datapoint: I downloaded scratch junior for the ipad and felt that it was overtly complex and left it at that. The next day my 5 year old discovers the app and before I knew it had figured out animations and scene transitions. He had previously used another app (Toontastic) and I think that helped with figuring out scratch. Its one of his favorite apps now and he can't wait to show me his latest projects!

Having taught 8th graders programming in Scratch and now building an introductory curriculum for high school freshmen with it, I can say that Scratch does an incredible job of honing in on the major algorithmic and data-based abstractions without having to worry about students comfort level with typing or even how much exposure they've had to computing at all. It also makes these concepts very visual, which serves as great reference once you start working with text based code. I'm a huge, huge fan.

(original poster here)

I need to research my daughter's curriculum in detail, and see when they get to e.g. variables and loops.

I tried to introduce Scratch for 10-11 year old kids in my country about 2 years ago. I was willing to teach 6 hours a week for free to do so. But the bureaucracy got the better of me. I'm happy to see that this is working somewhere.

Hopefully the UK will serve as an example. I think Microsoft and Google explicitly backing the project helped a lot.

The "try it now" button returns "Oh Noes! Scratch project cannot display." (because Flash), and the "Offline Editor" (in small print at the bottom of the page) appears to be based on Adobe Air.

When was Scratch changed to require Adobe products? I do not recall this being a thing in the past when Scratch was "just" a Smalltalk image.

They're in a maintenance window. The website uses Flash, the download uses Adobe Air.

It was a couple years ago. I was never a fan of the transition, but I must say scratch projects ran considerablly faster with flash player.

Well, the client was "just" a Squeak image, yes, but the web player was Java. As much as I hate Flash, it's certainly better than Java as far as user experience goes.

If you're looking for something Scratch-like that doesn't require plugins, have a look at Snap! It's just HTML and JavaScript.

http://snap.berkeley.edu/

I'd describe it as more Scheme-like than Smalltalk-like in flavor, which isn't too surprising since well-known Scheme education guru Brian Harvey is involved.

How about Alice? http://www.alice.org

Similar idea and tool-set but it's 3 dimensional scenes and worlds.

Years ago when I was younger, I tried to make an FPS in Alice, and didn't manage it. It's not quite as easy to work with as Scratch (with which I cloned Space Invaders and Pong).

I'm also not sure about Alice's love affair with Java. You can make it display the drag-and-drop code blocks in a pseudo-Java style, or make it display actual (uneditable) Java code in a separate pane. But is this actually helpful? Is it really a good idea to try to move from Alice to a "real" language?

I also have an 8 year-old daughter who not only spends endless hours at scratch.mit.edu coding apps, she also gets here friends (here in Canada) to do the same.

And if you have a look at the site you will see that not only are they learning coding and development skills, but they are also learning the ins and outs of social media.

And if you have a look at the site you will see that not only are they learning coding and development skills, but they are also learning the ins and outs of social media.

Why did you have to ruin this for me? I know you didn't mean to, but still.

Scratch's community is very different from other kinds of social media: it's strictly regulated by the MIT folks, so content is always friendly, welcoming, and age-appropriate. As a result of this, people tend to be encouraged to work together: you would be surprised what 10-year-old kids have produced together. A large part of Scratch culture is "collaborations" and "companies" which can produce large pieces of software with really incredible co-operation--better than a lot of adults I deal with :-)

I guess Scratch as a social network tries very hard to de-emphasize numbers: there isn't a "karma" and "likes" don't bring you much (interestingly, the number of "remixes", or derivative works of your project, is emphasized much more).

I can point you to some of the LLK's published papers on this if you're interested.

(Source: Scratch community member for >5 years.)

That doesn't really sound like "social media".

I can point you to some of the LLK's published papers on this if you're interested.

I'd appreciate that.

> That doesn't really sound like "social media".

It's "social" in the sense that it's a large community where people share things they create, make friends and have discussions. What would you say "social media" needs beyond that?

> I'd appreciate that.

Here are a few:

https://download.scratch.mit.edu/hill_monroy-hernandez_olson...

https://download.scratch.mit.edu/cscw2010poster2.pdf

https://download.scratch.mit.edu/websci09-andresmh.pdf

Right now I am passing through the Oracle Academy programs. The designed curriculum are using Alice and Greenfoot for developing familiarities with programming world. Me myself think that it is a great way for introducing programming in a "fun" way. Maybe anyone else have thoughts on this.

Honestly it looks idiotic. No wonder the current generation can't even use Google properly.

I've learned programming just fine with an old Basic book. We should stop treating our children like clueless morons.

This is literally for small children, to attract them with bright colours and dancing ballerinas and so on. The most important thing at this point being to catch their interest in becoming a wizard like us.

And as I note, it actually seems to work, which is you'll admit a bit of a plus point.

Per the article, Key Stage 3 (11yo and up) teaches them at least one "textual language" https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-curricul... It doesn't clarify what that is, but I strongly suspect it would be Python.

I believe Scratch has been part of the national primary education curriculum in China for a few years now. The coming generation is going to completely leapfrog their western counterpart.

If you have any details on this I would be most interested! dgerard at gmail

I'm very interested in teaching my kids to program, and so this is probably of interest to me, but I stopped reading after the first sentence because I would rather not need to slog through assertions of political identity to get to them.

NON-POLITICS: what I'm used to

POLITICS: anything I'm not used to

I mean, you just said "I literally didn't read this past the first sentence but I commented anyway." That's not helpful posting per the rules.

If you start reading at "scratch is probably the answer", there are no politics past that point. Hope that helps.

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