My 9 year old daughter surprised me yesterday with her little game made with Scratch. I was impressed.
I surprised her back when I did user-testing haha. She discovered the fun world of bugs and user's doing things they shouldn't!
I surprised her back when I did user-testing haha. She discovered the fun world of bugs and user's doing things they shouldn't!
Oh... that path takes you to strange places.
Mr. Fart’s Favorite Colors - https://medium.com/@blakeross/mr-fart-s-favorite-colors-3177... (7 years ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11231631 )
It starts when we’re 8 and coding our very first program. “What’s your favorite color?” it asks, sweetly, twirling a lock of Visual Basic around its finger. You type in your answer, the screen changes color accordingly, and boom — time to show off to family.
Then Aunt Jody calls.
“Honey, it froze on me. ‘Color.exe has crashed.’ I don’t know what that means.” You take a look at her entry. She entered: 2.
“I thought it asked how many favorite colors I had?”
But how could you…but what does it even mean to have more than one favori…ok, fine. No big deal. You add a sliver of code to stop people from typing numbers into the box.
Except my 10 year old brain did not understand what else meant. So I created, over the course of hours, a different if statement for every key on the keyboard that all ended with "you lose". Was a shock to me when my parents, after seeing my code for the first time, told me what else means. What a waste!
Wait till she gets tough PR reviews.
This block is ugly, and our team does not like looking at it :P
Scratch and Roblox conspiracy to create an army of child developers? :O
Scratch is open source software created by a nonprofit foundation to promote education and creativity.
Roblox exploits children for profit and I quite literally believe they are violating child labor laws.
Couldn't agree more the more I learn about them.
If Robux could only be converted into Amazon gift cards, I would still argue that was a labor violation, but I could at least understand why the case was murky.
Can Uber hire 16-year-olds to drive for them without a work permit as long as they're paid in special UbiCoins which are converted into dollars later?
Please shield her from doing UAT with unreasonable business stakeholders as long as you can
My ten year old is doing both scratch and makecode. The graphics in makecode are not as flexible as scratch, but it's fun to be able to make a game and run it on a physical device (pybadge).
One thing that really added to the fun when they were making games is I got a PS3 controller (which is bluetooth) and connected that to the computer as a keyboard, which Scratch code can then read and use in the games.
The first big (for them) project we did was: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/219423211/ They had just turned 7 and 9 when we did that and dad helped them out with a fair bit of guidance (and cribbing from other projects), but after this one, they really took to playing around with it on their own and a few times per month, I'll look over and see Adam using scratch around 5 years later.
PS: There is a Scratch Jr if your kids don't seem quite old enough to have the attention span/focus for scratch.
They do a lot of Minecraft now but are interested in TinkerCAD, which I’ll solidify by printing some of their designs. Not sure any of the beginner CAD apps are really easy, though.