The UK government has said all children will learn coding in school. What this actually means is shoving them in front of Scratch. My 7yo daughter and her friends - MLP-loving girly girls in pink dresses - are really into this and spending lots of time and attention on it. I find it hard to overstate how strongly I approve of this.
When I went to high school, there was a choice to go to this offshoot location for half the day, which had a programming class option. I went to that and it was what you'd expect out of a high school level programming class, I guess. Maybe a bit worse since in C++ and VB.NET it didn't really go into any abstract theory or even get to classes and functions. Except apparently now they've started using Scratch instead of real languages in it. I have to wonder if that's inappropriately dumbed down for that grade level. Someone should be able to handle real programming languages at that age if they're making a serious attempt to learn the field.
Scratch is a real programming language! Programming isn't about how fancy the tools you use are. It's about what you do with the tools you have. I started out in nothing more than QBasic.
QBasic was the Scratch of a certain era. The 0-to-pixels was small, the development environment offered useful help only a click away, and you could easily integrate it with external libraries if you wanted more advanced features or better performance.
It's bright and colourful and you can make the computer do things. It's perfect to catch the attention of a small child.
Right, it's great for them, but I was talking about high school
Sure, you want more than Scratch available - though seriously, if the kids just want to do Scratch? They learn that all this stuff is programmable and that they can make a computer do stuff. Do not underestimate the power of that epiphany, however it comes about.
I'm glad the UK government have ensured that every child will be learning to code - I wish they had the foresight to implement it 10 years ago. What concerns me is the people teaching the children to code - surely tapping into local community networks and reaching out to people who have been developing for years will allow the children to explore more exciting tech. Learning to code with Scratch is a great start - I'm just worried about the support networks in place to developer these young coders. Of course, the super motivated students will developer their skills outside of the classroom - I hope schools support those students who perhaps aren't as keen to code when they first start as well.
Does anyone have experience with other things like Scratch? I remember using a program, which looks a lot like Scratch (but isn't), at a technical summer camp when I was younger that let one make simple games with Scratch-like rules, but I can't remember what it was called.