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Scratch is not far off from growing with you. Back in 2013, I taught a 30-hour summer class for elementary and middle school students aimed at this. It was bou

Scratch is not far off from growing with you. Back in 2013, I taught a 30-hour summer class for elementary and middle school students aimed at this. It was bout 20 hours of programming concepts in Scratch, and then 10 hours of transferring their learning of Scratch semantics into Python syntax. Most of the younger students in the class wanted to keep playing with Scratch, but the older ones intuitively understood they could go far with Python -- and that Scratch was a nice place to test/debug algorithms before implementing the "final" version in Python.

jnicholasp 9y ago
Do you still have any of your curriculum or class notes? My nephews are in elementary school, and I'm looking for programs that their school/after school organizations could easily adopt.
jecel 9y ago
Logo was supposed to have "a low floor and no ceiling" and while Scratch certainly lowered the barriers to entry (floor) considerably it has a very serious ceiling (limits to what can be done in it). An early graphical Logo called Boxer was much better in this regard and there are projects to extend Scratch. John Maloney, who was not mentioned in the article but was the key person to making Scratch happen is working on: https://wiki.scratch.mit.edu/wiki/GP_(programming_language) https://wiki.scratch.mit.edu/wiki/GP_(programming_language) One of the links on that page is to Snap! which was used to introduce programming at Berkeley. You can use it as a Scratch written in Javascript and so able to run in any web browser. The extensions are a bit clunky, but pretty interesting.