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I teach kids from 6 to 12 years with Scratch (and other tools) in my spare time. If you are a developer you should try it out. It's amazing how creative kids ar
by madethemcry 8y ago
I teach kids from 6 to 12 years with Scratch (and other tools) in my spare time. If you are a developer you should try it out. It's amazing how creative kids are with a tool like Scratch. My programming career started with Flash 4 and allowed me to work with sound, audio and animations together with the possibility to program and to easily distribute it (there was a single swf file).
Scratch is like the distilled version of it optimized for kids. I would have loved it as a kid and I see how natural children can work with it. Mitchel Resnick and his team did a great job with Scratch and it's amazing to finally see it working in HTML5 - after being a Flash based application.
Teaching coding to kids is important and as a developer it's easy to say so. Some day I made the decision to think about the why to better explain people why I do the teaching. The end product was a 25min talk I gave at the JSConf EU 2018 in Berlin. Maybe that's of interest for parents reading here about Scratch and of course fellow developers interested in teaching coding to kids.
https://youtu.be/t0m5rrKKMOA https://youtu.be/t0m5rrKKMOA (About Coding Kids and Screaming Carrots — JSConf EU 2018)
Here the slides and all information I mentioned in the talk:
https://github.com/georgiee/coding-for-kids https://github.com/georgiee/coding-for-kids
My summary why a kid should learn coding:
> It's about teaching kids to be producer instead of a consumer
> so they can build their own games, tell their own stories
> and create their own music.
- RantyDave 8y agoFlash? Scratch was written in Smalltalk.
- madethemcry 8y agoThat's Scratch 1. Scratch 2 (2013) is based on Flash so it can be distributed in the browser (via Flash Plugin) and as a desktop application (Adobe Air).
- jecel 8y agoNote that Scratch 1 could also be distributed in the browser using the Squeak VM plugin. Except school IT people wouldn't allow students and teachers to install that as too dangerous (meaning, they hadn't heard of it) but they would allow the Flash Plugin to be installed. So the rewrite was to solve a political issue rather than a technical one. Sadly, this happened right when some key people decided that Flash was evil, so a second rewrite became necessary.