MIT Scratch – Teach kids to program stories, games, and animations
scratch.mit.edu
scratch.mit.edu
I have literally heard kids shout out "Oh! That's why we learned those x y things in school!" when learning how to move sprites about on a grid. They have no idea they are learning math, and they generally have a spectacular time making even the simplest game, like a scrolling shooter, or moon lander.
My favorite discovery during our three years has been seeing how kids name their games. It's never "David's Moon Lander." It's always something more like "David's Super Awesome Cat Launching Space Lander With Flame Throwers." It's like watching kids draw anything they want with crayons: they get to theme and tweak games however they see fit.
As a volunteer organization, we can always use more teachers to help us spread Scratch to the masses. Our classes are free and offered to kids ages 8 to 14, and we do a simple game each week.
How old are the children in your class?
Can you give any other suggestions about other programming languages that can be used as kids grow older?
But there's now a free online tutorial system aimed at "Scratch kids" who want to take the next step. http://s2js.com -- tutors kids through the bits of Javascript they need to know in order to write graphical games that'll run on their smartdevices. It's tutorial, simple development tool, private image storage, and deployment facility all in one.
It's "Javascript as told to Scratchers", and the goal is to provide a bridge that gets them from the delights of Scratch, onto something else that will take them on their journey. S2JS isn't the destination, it's the "enthusiasm transfer tool".
Squeak has a comprehensive ecosystem; here's an excellent book for high-schoolers: http://www.apress.com/9781590594919
The complete pdf can also be downloaded from the associated website: http://rmod.lille.inria.fr/botsinc/
Now imagine this combined with hardware robots...
Also, we have started to build a Scratch Extension system, where Javascript can be used to extend the functionality of Scratch (you can define blocks that call web-apis, etc.) We will have more information about that in 2015.
After scratch we have seen some of the kids get excited about js mostly through the khan academy resources (have you tried it)? Also code combat has been a recent favorite.
Our older and more advanced coders are ok with codecademy.
Also we have some that really want to get their work out to the world, so after a while on scratch they teach themselves html and css.
We are very particular about not lecturing, not forcing a learning approach, just facilitating as different learning styles find their way.
Also if anyone is interested we are giving away our "code club kit" including resources for starting a code club. It has been the most rewarding part of my career. Just let me know and I'll send it in email.
In my case, it was the perfect way to learn about some of the important principles that underpin programming, without necessarily realising that it was happening. Scratch just allowed me to be creative with ideas for simple games. You can take away a lot of the cornerstones of imperative programming (loops, variables, booleans, conditionals) but also evented programming concepts; which will make sense straight away in a language like Javascript.
My father is a Head Teacher at a primary school in the UK and has introduced it into the ICT curriculum to great effect. There are primary age children (< 10 years old) starting to experiment with Ruby and Python at school, as a result of positive experiences with Scratch. It's is also how I interested my younger brother in programming and he in turn took A-level computing and has applied to study CS at University. I don't think Scratch was as much of a factor in his story, but it was certainly his starting point.
Overall, I think it's a fundamental stepping stone that children should have the chance to try at school. It represents the opportunity to find out whether you enjoy programming. Until I picked it up, it had never crossed my mind that I might.
Hats off to the Scratch team!
1) I have neither a computer science nor a teaching background. (I'm a self-taught web-dev hack) but I am interested in introducing local kids to programming. I helped run a couple Hour of Code sessions last week at my kids' elementary school, and I think I could get support there to start up some kind of after-school program. But I'm a bit lost as to what a good curriculum would look like. Anyone here have any pointers or suggestions?
2) I believe that Blockly (https://developers.google.com/blockly/) was the engine behind the Hour of Code exercise I used last week. It's available as a client-side library to include in your web applications, but I couldn't track down its license. It looks like, if one were to nail down a good curriculum, you could use Blockly to build a learning environment to accompany it.
1) There's a super useful Scratch Curriculum guide - made by the folks from ScratchEd. http://scratched.gse.harvard.edu/resources/scratch-curriculu...
2) Blockly seems to be under the Apache license (https://github.com/google/blockly)
Even though Blockly (and it's predecessor, "App Inventor") is made by Google (the great and the powerful), I have to say, I would rather be introduced to code by Scratch than by Blockly. Scratch is much simpler-looking, it has a beautiful interface, and (most importantly) it has one of the friendliest communities in case you need help or want to show off a project.
I'm split on scratch. On the surface it was easy to get the kids to engage, but I didn't really feel it led to much understanding of programming as a whole. And it did not seem to hold their attention for very long.
I switched to C# XNA, with a good number of my own convenience libraries and boiler plates that allowed the kids to dig in and they haven't looked back. It's just very sad that Microsoft dumped XNA, and also that it's locked to windows which caused a lot of problems(basically only 30% of the kids had access to a windows PC and the club basically had to provide the kids access to a windows PC lab to work, which prevented many kids from being able to work on their games outside of the lab).
I'm continuing to look for another framework like XNA that has a sufficiently easy barrier to entry(with a good amount of guidance from teachers/club leaders), while really introducing the kids to programming.
For reference, here is a github snapshot of an example project I took the kids through with great success a few years back: https://github.com/zeewheeler/space_shooter_vgpc.git
For middle-school and up kids I would unreservedly recommend Racket. The curriculum at http://htdp.org is far and away the best introduction to programming concepts I've ever seen.
(One of the annoying things when we tried rolling SSL out a while back: we got a bunch of reports that users with OS X couldn't access the site - turns out the OS X's parental control blocks SSL sites by default unless explicitly allowed in the whitelist: http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201813)