Today we had our 3rd Reaktor Kids Kode Skool event at the office with 8 (or so) kids. This time we tried the Scratch learning environment. And it was great fun. With Scratch, you can assemble simple (and even complex) programs by dragging visual building blocks together. It's easy to move and animate sprites (figures), add sounds and control logic to them.
It was fun to find out that you can use similar structures as you'd use in Turtle Roy, for chaining and repeating things. But in Scratch you can compose them visually, which seems to make the program structure easier to build and understand.
I strongly recommend trying out Scratch. It took me like 30 minutes to familiarize myself with the system before the event, so that I can show it to the others. Before that I had only heard about Scratch, so you can say I started from scratch.
Here's a video depicting one of the greatest masterpieces produced by the kids. I hope you won't get an epileptic seizure from watching this.
Scratch is great for trying out programming, but it really sucks at abstractions (making your own definitions). Another thing that bugs me is that Scratch is inherently parallel but it lacks all kinds of synchronisation. For the abstraction thing, there's BYOB. But I'd rather just use some ready-made sprite framework for a language that has proper REPL. Some Logo versions feature multiple turtles, and you can change the picture of a turtle, so that covers the use case.
ReplyDeleteAgreed! It's a very nice environment anyways to get started with programming, because it contains all the necessary tools to make visual and aural effects as well. Very compelling I'd say.
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