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Have you programmed in scratch for any significant amount of time? I have, so have my kids, and as a CS prof (at a small non-engineering college) I encourage my students to do so too. Before age 10, almost entirely on their own, my kids discovered ideas like abstraction (writing custom blocks), recursion, data representation (e.g. encoding/decoding pairs, structs and lists into arbitrary-precision integers), asynchronous vs. synchronous functions, performance tuning, 3d perspective graphics, and race conditions. At bedtime it's not unusual for them to ask about, say, what happens if you do recursion without a base case, or wonder whether you could simulate the scratch language within scratch itself.

All of these things are fundamental CS concepts, and they seem to grasp these at a much deeper level than I did at that age, and better than most of my college students. Yes, they also do some python, html/css, a little java, a bit of javascript. And those all have their place, and they like making websites. But the scratch infrastructure is fantastic. Good learning curve. Just enough language power to do amazing things (threads, fork, async notifications, custom blocks, cloud variables for multiplayer online). Instant publishing. Great community. Fantastic programmers (hi Griffpatch!) putting out incredibly clever programs to admire.

So all this is to say that it is unfair to dismiss scratch as "a cat walks towards a barn".

I was trying to be careful not to do that, and you'll see that I didn't. So long as we're not in conflict it's okay, and certainly Scratch is more than cats and barns.

But my point remains that cats and barns could be interpreted as "fun because they're kids" since no CS prof in their right mind would teach students that way at, say, MIT. Maybe robots.

The problem isn't with teachers who teach the magic of computers with cats and barns. It's with the teachers who confuse the fun with cats and barns and underplay the real magic, which then leads the students to be confused and unimpressed as well.

Whenever I saw educational games as a child I'd immediately sense the "adults intent to entertain" through boring characters and ugly art. Now, that isn't to discredit their effort, but when you're a kid obsessed with Super Mario Brothers, it's tough competition. Needless to say, educational NES/Famicon games did not fair well on the market. Everyone loved Mario.

Yes, perhaps I was being a bit unfair.

However, bad teachers will always be with us, and won't start teaching the magic of computers just because you give them a c64 or basic. They'll just make kids write endless employee pay calculator programs and other drudgery.

I do agree with your general sentiment about the transparency of "intent to entertain". But I really don't see it with scratch. There's a silly cat on the front page, and comic-book logos. But 5 minutes after first being introduced to that, kids are already looking at Griffpatch's latest multi-player cloud-based platformer, or the cool 3d render program, or the interactive fractal, or the simulated ice-cream shop factory, then 5 minutes later they are staring at code trying to figure out how they did it so they can make their own. Really. On the frontpage right now, the top-featured studio (i.e. a collective hacking club) is called "Lindenmayer Systems!" [1], showing their latest L-system fractal fern generator [2]. I really don't see a lot of "forcefully tailored" entertainment here. Just a site filled with projects made by kids and adults on a huge range of topics, from lipstick, fashion and silly greeting cards, to mathematical and engineering.

Incidentally, I'm assuming you know scratch was designed at MIT, and many aspects were deliberately designed to teach advanced concepts. And that it has, in fact, been used in college classrooms (Harvard [2], others I believe). Still, I contend that my kids with no formal CS education have a far better concept of an abstract data type because of scratch sprites, and this has carried over very naturally to other languages (Java objects, smalltalk message passing, etc.).

[1]: https://scratch.mit.edu/studios/1677151/ [2]: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/1318150/#editor [3]: http://paradox1x.org/2011/11/introducing-programming-in-coll...

Yes, made at MIT for kids, not students. Building Scratch was the assignment, and it was probably a lot of fun. I in no way wish to discredit the efforts of those who use and maintain Scratch.

The only meaningful point I might add would be that kids love to compete with adults. They want the real thing. Of course, most can't handle the real thing, so we give them what we think they can handle. Except, for the smart kids, the bar is always too low because it has to be adjusted for the averages. So they feel like they're being treated like kids, and that their intelligence is being undermined, and they may even feel discriminated against. Basically, they don't think of themselves as kids. We the adults think of them as kids. Not that they aren't kids of course, but we should never limit their intelligence based on what we think they can handle.

It's a shame modern video games are so complex and cinematic. To Scratch's credit, here is mario:

https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/31583772/#editor

and:

https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/71455048/

>they seem to grasp these at a much deeper level than I did at that age..

What real difference will it make in the future? I think none. Some one who understanding recursion when they were 10 will not end up much better programmer than someone who was exposed to it at 20, and have sufficient experience in using the concept. Same with other CS concepts.

The idea of making kids learn this sounds great, because it looks great when kids do stuff with computers. But it is not really giving them and advantage in the future.

Why do you think so? It's a common knowledge early start gives one an advantage in many disciplines: music, ballet, chess. Why are you so sure programming is so different?

I think those things are different. How many people in the world can create music like Beethoven or Mozart? How many people would have been able to beat Deep Blue in chess at that time? I can imagine there would be music that could only be rendered on a piano or violin, by only a hand full of people in the whole world.

In a similar manner, do you know a program that could only have been written by an 'expert' programmer, or only a hand full of expert programmers in the whole world? I don't think so.

The essence of what I am saying is that, programming is not a hard enough thing to waste those precious early years on.

Yes, I can think of programs that can only be designed and implemented by top 1% of programmers.

Regarding "programming is not a [...] thing to waste those precious early years on.", well, this is not something I'd like to argue about, just want to say that learning programming by a kid doesn't have to be (and, of course, shouldn't be) a 8h or more daily activity, like for a professional adult programmer. I think an hour per week of learning programming can be a valuable exercise in logical thinking, creativity and problem solving. It can easily be a lot of fun, too.

> I can think of programs that can only be designed and implemented by top 1% of programmers...

Interesting. Can you share some of those...?

EDIT: Oh, I just noticed that you said top 1% of all programmers. I was not talking about top 1%. I was talking about a handfull of them. Top 1% would be quite more than a hand full. But please share those programs anyway...

There is plenty of things like that, but it's really off topic.

Scratch is more programming than HTML/CSS by far. It has control structures, functions, etc. Aside from the most obvious projects (games), we've used the Kinect for input and directly interfaced with hardware. We've solved a ton of Euler Project problems in scratch and created physics simulations. I'd be hard pressed to find something you can't do in scratch with enough creativity.

For kids, the biggest limiting factor is typing speed. With most languages, as soon as they can think faster than they can type, you hit a second roadblock of frustration where they are thinking too far ahead of what they're doing. Scratch really just abstracts boilerplate for things like showing a sprite and moving it into draggable blocks. The transition from Scratch to Python has historically been pretty easy since most of the kids understand the abstract concepts really well after 1-4 years of Scratch.

>So compared to that, having a cat walk towards a barn seems like a completely irrelevant layer of entertainment forcefully tailored to the taste of the students, who at best are distracted from the real fun, or at worst presumed to be incapable of understanding why programming itself might be fun.

The turtle/cat is a concrete place holder for abstractions like state and variables. Being able to to grasp algebraic variables and other high level abstractions is correlated with Piaget's formal operational stage of cognitive development which most children only begin entering in middle school. You probably could teach a 9 year old programming without these training wheels in the same sense that you could probably teach them algebra.

"Having animals and colorful bricks is okay, so long as we're not in conflict with what is actually fun about w that is being taught here..."

The concept of 'fun' is highly personal. Surely you are not suggesting there is only one way to enjoy using a computer :)

"Programming is fun because we can control the machine, and make it do things... magically, at our whim, with the right combination of instructions."

I think you are creating a value statement that is not universally true. My son enjoys programming because he can draw himself a character and the program the character to respond to key presses. The machine between him and the program is irrelevant to him.

"draw himself a character and the program the character to respond to key presses."

Except, don't you see that that's him controlling the machine and making it do things magically at his whim with the right combination of instructions?

The statement I made may not be universal, but you provided an example, not a counterexample, which infers you may not have well understood the full scope of said statement.

And most certainly cats and barns is a stab at universal-as-possible fun. We may not be identical, but nor are we that different.