Tuesday May 15, 2007
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Tuesday May 15, 2007 | Playing With Scratch | Computers |
There's lots of buzz about a computer programming language for kids called Scratch. It's from MIT so decided it was worth a look. I'm pretty impressed with it and wish my daughter was a little older (she turned 4 today!). I'm still going to show it to her and make the kitty dance and play music, but I don't think she'll be programming herself just yet. Give her a few more days. 
These teaching languages have some a long way since Logo and Basic. It's good to link the concept of programming to something tangible, or visible, like Scratch and Lego Mindstorms do. For me, learning Basic in the 6th grade on a TRS-80, the "hook" for me was trying to draw a picture on the screen. I could "set" and "reset" individual pixels on the screen using the command line, but they would eventually scroll off the screen. When someone showed me how to write a program to do it I could suddenly draw anything I wanted. At first I still drew each pixel one at a time, but that lead me to learn about control structure (loops) and variables.
To me, this is what makes for a successful learning process: first create the need or desire, and then learning the theory is easy. When you try and teach the theory first, without a need, or even a frame of reference, then kids (and adults) have a harder time learning. That's why I like the Scratch program because it lets the student start off with something simple. Hopefully, this will trigger a need and then the student will be driven to find a way of making it happen.
Tags: programming | computers | scratch | computer programming
Tags: computers programming scratch
May 15, 2007 03:39 PM PDT Permalink | Comments [1] |
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Kevin Chu, Some Rights Reserved.
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