Scratch - Programming For Kids

I'm always on the look out for something that I can use to help teach programming to our son (who is almost nine). I've posted on this before, but Duncan was a little too young at that time. He's the perfect age now.

This topic also came up on the internal Sun Mac users mailing list a couple months ago, and I noted down all the suggestions (with some repeats from my previously list). They were (in no particular order):

• Greenfoot

• Squeak

  Smalltalk based. Easy to learn, and Squeak has lots of additional stuff oriented to children.
  Related Links:
  

  • Squeakland

• Logo

  Related Links:
  

  • The Logo Programming Language
    
  • Turtle Geomatry book
    
  • StarLogo
    
  • Works by Seymour Papert

• Lego MindStorms

• Breve

• Scratch

• Alice

  "You learn to program interactive 3D graphics. The built-in tutorial is excellent."

So many to choose from.

A couple of days ago, I decided to download Scratch. I also downloaded the simple 14 page tutorial and watched Duncan work through it. This was accompanied by the occasional outburst of "Wow!" and "Cool!"

He then watch a couple of Scratch videos for inspiration and he was raring to go. Within fifteen minutes he had two sprites, a lobster and a drum up in the work area. The lobster continually turned and as it "hit" the drum, a sound would be played.

All with absolutely no help from Dad. In fact, I was a hindrance. At one point, he wanted to add in some "code" such that when Esc was pressed, everything would stop. I was trying to tell him that he needed to add a couple extra "bricks" in an existing script. What he really needed to do was just create a separate simple script to do this single action. I was encumbered by the limitation of thinking in the way of previous graphical toolkits that I'd worked with. Scratch makes it so much simpler.

What really impressed me was that you could continue to build and modify your program as it was running, so you could immediately see the effect of tweaking any of the parameters or adding in extra steps or new scripts.

The other nice option is you can take one of the numerous existing programs, download it from their web site, and fiddle about with it to your hearts content, to see how it works.

There is quite a community built up around this environment.

At some point I want to sit down and work my way through the reference guide, and read some of the research papers, but so far I'm keeping up with him (now I understand how the scripting engine works).

I'd highly recommend Scratch to anyone who'd like to teach their young kids how to program.

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( Aug 17 2007, 09:59:25 AM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink Comments [5]