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Comment by dmoo | Hacker News Reader

Scratch and its clones are a great way to start for kids without the problems of syntax errors. Everything always works. It might not do what you want but it always does something.

Kids at my local coderdojo enjoy beetleblocks which is like 3d scratch http://beetleblocks.com/run/ The files can be exported and used in a minecraft clone https://twitter.com/damianmooney/status/843594021024993280

Microsoft have just announced a block based code environment for minecraftedu https://youtu.be/3rKuSlgqePo

It seems like a way of coding that has really taken off.

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There is a big difference between Microsoft's Minecraft: Education Edition product and MinecraftEdu. Microsoft's product offering is a pale shadow of the much-loved MinecraftEdu. Educators are still complaining about it: the subscription named-user licensing model, the lack of the ComputerCraft Lua programmable robot turtles, the lack of classroom management tools, on and on.

It is a great example of a company buying an awesome product and then throwing it on the trash heap of history.

Microsoft bought something, transformed it to monetise it, and ruined it in the process; say it ain't so. /s

Can I recommend Minetest

is there Minetest Edu ?

So true! We love Scratch.

There is also an open source project called Blockly run by Google. It's the "puzzle piece" portion of Scratch, which is an amazing resource to integrate into other kids learn-to-code projects.

I am using Blockly at http://block.school

We are the first live online school teaching kids to code. We've paired the Scratch concept with a 3D block world sorta like Minecraft. We're building out the curriculum now but you can try a demo here:

http://course.block.school/demo

We have some pretty amazing students building things at ages 6+ :)

I think Scratch 3 is being built on top of Blocky with Google's help. No more Flash - yay!

Great to know, thanks for sharing!

more info at https://wiki.scratch.mit.edu/wiki/Scratch_3.0

The syntax thing is definitely true, but opens up a different problem: people can now write code without understanding what it does. Throw some blocks together and look, the cat is doing things. From my experience this is usually a problem where students are being forced into programming where they have no major interest, or where the teacher does not understand what's going on so can't help or assess the student properly. I would suggest that this is the situation in the majority of classrooms that have jumped on the 'code' bandwagon.

> Throw some blocks together and look, the cat is doing things.

I don't know much about psychology, but I suspect a kid below a certain age is much less interested in how a cat does something than with the cat actually doing it. If they're interested, they'll naturally reach the limit of their tools, and learn about the cat's internals.

From an HN thread today on combinatorics:

  list(itertools.permutations('abc'))

I don't want to have to know how that works merely to use it, and if knowing the implementation was required to use it, it would slow down my progress. If I was eight, it might slow down my interest.

Taken back to an extreme, a baby on your lap would not be interested if your finger pointed to the word 'cat' on a line of text in a book and said "cat!". But they would be interested if you pointed to a picture of a cat.

Whatever's appropriate for an age, and for an individual, is probably best.

This is exactly how very young children initially learn many things, though. The first developmental stages of writing are often drawing lines of squiggles that ape lines of adult writing, moving on to random collections of letters.

True, but my experience is with much older kids (high school), where the problem is more that they have no interest in coding, so throw some blocks together and hope the teacher doesn't know what's going on either.

The opportunities for high school kids to malinger and avoid learning things are many and manifest.

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