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Scratch and its clones are a great way to start for kids without the problems of syntax errors. Everything always works. It might not do what you want but it a
by dmoo 9y ago
Scratch and its clones are a great way to start for kids without the problems of syntax errors.
Everything always works. It might not do what you want but it always does something.
Kids at my local coderdojo enjoy beetleblocks which is like 3d scratch
http://beetleblocks.com/run/ http://beetleblocks.com/run/
The files can be exported and used in a minecraft clone
https://twitter.com/damianmooney/status/843594021024993280 https://twitter.com/damianmooney/status/843594021024993280
Microsoft have just announced a block based code environment for minecraftedu
https://youtu.be/3rKuSlgqePo https://youtu.be/3rKuSlgqePo
It seems like a way of coding that has really taken off.
- tonydiv 9y agoSo true! We love Scratch. There is also an open source project called Blockly run by Google. It's the "puzzle piece" portion of Scratch, which is an amazing resource to integrate into other kids learn-to-code projects. I am using Blockly at http://block.school http://block.school We are the first live online school teaching kids to code. We've paired the Scratch concept with a 3D block world sorta like Minecraft. We're building out the curriculum now but you can try a demo here: http://course.block.school/demo http://course.block.school/demo We have some pretty amazing students building things at ages 6+ :)
- patja 9y agoThere is a big difference between Microsoft's Minecraft: Education Edition product and MinecraftEdu. Microsoft's product offering is a pale shadow of the much-loved MinecraftEdu. Educators are still complaining about it: the subscription named-user licensing model, the lack of the ComputerCraft Lua programmable robot turtles, the lack of classroom management tools, on and on. It is a great example of a company buying an awesome product and then throwing it on the trash heap of history.
- askvictor 9y agoThe syntax thing is definitely true, but opens up a different problem: people can now write code without understanding what it does. Throw some blocks together and look, the cat is doing things. From my experience this is usually a problem where students are being forced into programming where they have no major interest, or where the teacher does not understand what's going on so can't help or assess the student properly. I would suggest that this is the situation in the majority of classrooms that have jumped on the 'code' bandwagon.
- caf 9y agoThis is exactly how very young children initially learn many things, though. The first developmental stages of writing are often drawing lines of squiggles that ape lines of adult writing, moving on to random collections of letters.
- askvictor 9y agoTrue, but my experience is with much older kids (high school), where the problem is more that they have no interest in coding, so throw some blocks together and hope the teacher doesn't know what's going on either.
- caf 9y agoThe opportunities for high school kids to malinger and avoid learning things are many and manifest.
- a3n 9y ago> Throw some blocks together and look, the cat is doing things. I don't know much about psychology, but I suspect a kid below a certain age is much less interested in how a cat does something than with the cat actually doing it. If they're interested, they'll naturally reach the limit of their tools, and learn about the cat's internals. From an HN thread today on combinatorics: list(itertools.permutations('abc')) I don't want to have to know how that works merely to use it, and if knowing the implementation was required to use it, it would slow down my progress. If I was eight, it might slow down my interest. Taken back to an extreme, a baby on your lap would not be interested if your finger pointed to the word 'cat' on a line of text in a book and said "cat!". But they would be interested if you pointed to a picture of a cat. Whatever's appropriate for an age, and for an individual, is probably best.