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My 9 year old daughter surprised me yesterday with her little game made with Scratch. I was impressed. I surprised her back when I did user-testing haha. She

My 9 year old daughter surprised me yesterday with her little game made with Scratch. I was impressed. I surprised her back when I did user-testing haha. She discovered the fun world of bugs and user's doing things they shouldn't!

asciii 4y ago
> I surprised her back when I did user-testing Wait till she gets tough PR reviews. This block is ugly, and our team does not like looking at it :P
- samstave 4y ago
  AND This damn kid WORKS FROM HOME every darn day and doesnt even let me know on Slack!
- qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
  Remember that robblox investigation, were they interviewed that 12 year old that already talked like a burned out developer, feeling cheated out of the revenue. The children yearn for the mines.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gXlauRB1EQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gXlauRB1EQ
  - asciii 4y ago
    Yikes... Scratch and Roblox conspiracy to create an army of child developers? :O
    - Wowfunhappy 4y ago
      Please do not conflate Scratch and Roblox! Scratch is open source software created by a nonprofit foundation to promote education and creativity. Roblox exploits children for profit and I quite literally believe they are violating child labor laws.
      - asciii 4y ago
        > I quite literally believe they are violating child labor laws. Couldn't agree more the more I learn about them.
        Wowfunhappy 4y ago
        I would actually be very interested to hear from a lawyer—or at least someone with legal knowledge—why Roblox hasn't been prosecuted for this. These children are creating value for the company, and they're being compensated via a currency which can be converted into dollars. How is that not payment for work? If Robux could only be converted into Amazon gift cards, I would still argue that was a labor violation, but I could at least understand why the case was murky. Can Uber hire 16-year-olds to drive for them without a work permit as long as they're paid in special UbiCoins which are converted into dollars later?
  - bitdivision 4y ago
    The part in question: https://youtu.be/_gXlauRB1EQ?t=827 https://youtu.be/_gXlauRB1EQ?t=827
welfare 4y ago
Quality Assurance is a first reality-check. Please shield her from doing UAT with unreasonable business stakeholders as long as you can
pixelize 4y ago
I LOL'ed! You really brought out the QA and product testing on her, haha!
shagie 4y ago
> I surprised her back when I did user-testing haha. She discovered the fun world of bugs and user's doing things they shouldn't! Oh... that path takes you to strange places. Mr. Fart’s Favorite Colors - https://medium.com/@blakeross/mr-fart-s-favorite-colors-3177a406c775 https://medium.com/@blakeross/mr-fart-s-favorite-colors-3177... (7 years ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11231631 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11231631 ) It starts when we’re 8 and coding our very first program. “What’s your favorite color?” it asks, sweetly, twirling a lock of Visual Basic around its finger. You type in your answer, the screen changes color accordingly, and boom — time to show off to family. Then Aunt Jody calls. “Honey, it froze on me. ‘Color.exe has crashed.’ I don’t know what that means.” You take a look at her entry. She entered: 2. “I thought it asked how many favorite colors I had?” But how could you…but what does it even mean to have more than one favori…ok, fine. No big deal. You add a sliver of code to stop people from typing numbers into the box.
- skeaker 4y ago
  Great read, thanks for sharing. This took me down an hour long rabbit hole of airplane safety procedures which is not what you would have expected going in.
dunham 4y ago
We had one in makecode that I had to look into after my kid left for school. (He was pretty frustrated.) Turned out that it wasn't applying changes we made in the code and the window needed to be reloaded. My ten year old is doing both scratch and makecode. The graphics in makecode are not as flexible as scratch, but it's fun to be able to make a game and run it on a physical device (pybadge).
- alan_russell 4y ago
  https://microblocks.fun/ https://microblocks.fun/ have the same flexibility as Scratch. In fact, they are both works by John Maloney.
alexb_ 4y ago
I remember when I was young, I made a scratch game that was just "Guess the secret letter". Basically "if l pressed, you win, else you lose". Except my 10 year old brain did not understand what else meant. So I created, over the course of hours, a different if statement for every key on the keyboard that all ended with "you lose". Was a shock to me when my parents, after seeing my code for the first time, told me what else means. What a waste!
- detritus 4y ago
  One of the fun things about having a kid is realising how fundamentally-learned everything is, and how much we adults end up taking for granted. I catch myself so many times explaining things to my daughter, and then realising that the terms and concepts I'm using in the description also need describing. (She's 22).
- sa48k 4y ago
  I had a similar experience as a kid when making a game in BASIC. The player could choose their difficulty level, with higher difficulty levels having less obstacles for the player to hide behind. My code to calculate the number of obstacles looked like 'if diff=10 then obs=1; if diff=9 then obs=2; if diff=8 then obs=3; etc.' My dad looked at it, deleted all ten lines, replaced them with 'obs = 11 - diff', and my jaw hit the floor.
vb234 4y ago
I’ve been tempted to teach my daughter programming with scratch. At what age did you introduce your daughter to Scratch and programming? Where there any helpful/fun guides you or she discovered along the way?
- JoeOfTexas 4y ago
  She uses it at school, but no one taught her how to use it. She has followed tutorials for making games on Roblox Studio in the past. However, kids just hit the ground running with Scratch way better than adults.
  - vb234 4y ago
    That makes a lot of sense. As a lapsed programmer myself, I found the Scratch interface was not very intuitive.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  I introduced to my kids at around 6 and 8. 6 was maybe a little early, but not much (and will vary by kid, of course). One thing that really added to the fun when they were making games is I got a PS3 controller (which is bluetooth) and connected that to the computer as a keyboard, which Scratch code can then read and use in the games. The first big (for them) project we did was: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/219423211/ https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/219423211/ They had just turned 7 and 9 when we did that and dad helped them out with a fair bit of guidance (and cribbing from other projects), but after this one, they really took to playing around with it on their own and a few times per month, I'll look over and see Adam using scratch around 5 years later. PS: There is a Scratch Jr if your kids don't seem quite old enough to have the attention span/focus for scratch.
  - vb234 4y ago
    Thank you. Scratch Jr looks interesting and is probably a better introduction for my 6 year old.
- jkestner 4y ago
AzzieElbab 4y ago
I code in 5 languages professionally, and I also do infrastructure and architecture. My kid is so much better than me in Scratch; it is embarrassing.
unfairly4820 4y ago
Found this piece of code long ago online , Calculator game made from a kid from Scratch... (but spelled Claculator lol) https://i.redd.it/5t9mpdhzzniz.png https://i.redd.it/5t9mpdhzzniz.png
beshur 4y ago
<nerdy dad doing PBJ according to the kid's instructions video>

asciii 4y ago

> I surprised her back when I did user-testing Wait till she gets tough PR reviews. This block is ugly, and our team does not like looking at it :P

samstave 4y ago
AND This damn kid WORKS FROM HOME every darn day and doesnt even let me know on Slack!
qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
Remember that robblox investigation, were they interviewed that 12 year old that already talked like a burned out developer, feeling cheated out of the revenue. The children yearn for the mines.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gXlauRB1EQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gXlauRB1EQ
- asciii 4y ago
  Yikes... Scratch and Roblox conspiracy to create an army of child developers? :O
  - Wowfunhappy 4y ago
    Please do not conflate Scratch and Roblox! Scratch is open source software created by a nonprofit foundation to promote education and creativity. Roblox exploits children for profit and I quite literally believe they are violating child labor laws.
    - asciii 4y ago
      > I quite literally believe they are violating child labor laws. Couldn't agree more the more I learn about them.
      - Wowfunhappy 4y ago
        I would actually be very interested to hear from a lawyer—or at least someone with legal knowledge—why Roblox hasn't been prosecuted for this. These children are creating value for the company, and they're being compensated via a currency which can be converted into dollars. How is that not payment for work? If Robux could only be converted into Amazon gift cards, I would still argue that was a labor violation, but I could at least understand why the case was murky. Can Uber hire 16-year-olds to drive for them without a work permit as long as they're paid in special UbiCoins which are converted into dollars later?
- bitdivision 4y ago
  The part in question: https://youtu.be/_gXlauRB1EQ?t=827 https://youtu.be/_gXlauRB1EQ?t=827

welfare 4y ago

Quality Assurance is a first reality-check. Please shield her from doing UAT with unreasonable business stakeholders as long as you can

pixelize 4y ago

I LOL'ed! You really brought out the QA and product testing on her, haha!

shagie 4y ago

> I surprised her back when I did user-testing haha. She discovered the fun world of bugs and user's doing things they shouldn't! Oh... that path takes you to strange places. Mr. Fart’s Favorite Colors - https://medium.com/@blakeross/mr-fart-s-favorite-colors-3177a406c775 https://medium.com/@blakeross/mr-fart-s-favorite-colors-3177... (7 years ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11231631 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11231631 ) It starts when we’re 8 and coding our very first program. “What’s your favorite color?” it asks, sweetly, twirling a lock of Visual Basic around its finger. You type in your answer, the screen changes color accordingly, and boom — time to show off to family. Then Aunt Jody calls. “Honey, it froze on me. ‘Color.exe has crashed.’ I don’t know what that means.” You take a look at her entry. She entered: 2. “I thought it asked how many favorite colors I had?” But how could you…but what does it even mean to have more than one favori…ok, fine. No big deal. You add a sliver of code to stop people from typing numbers into the box.

skeaker 4y ago
Great read, thanks for sharing. This took me down an hour long rabbit hole of airplane safety procedures which is not what you would have expected going in.

dunham 4y ago

We had one in makecode that I had to look into after my kid left for school. (He was pretty frustrated.) Turned out that it wasn't applying changes we made in the code and the window needed to be reloaded. My ten year old is doing both scratch and makecode. The graphics in makecode are not as flexible as scratch, but it's fun to be able to make a game and run it on a physical device (pybadge).

alan_russell 4y ago
https://microblocks.fun/ https://microblocks.fun/ have the same flexibility as Scratch. In fact, they are both works by John Maloney.

alexb_ 4y ago

I remember when I was young, I made a scratch game that was just "Guess the secret letter". Basically "if l pressed, you win, else you lose". Except my 10 year old brain did not understand what else meant. So I created, over the course of hours, a different if statement for every key on the keyboard that all ended with "you lose". Was a shock to me when my parents, after seeing my code for the first time, told me what else means. What a waste!

detritus 4y ago
One of the fun things about having a kid is realising how fundamentally-learned everything is, and how much we adults end up taking for granted. I catch myself so many times explaining things to my daughter, and then realising that the terms and concepts I'm using in the description also need describing. (She's 22).
sa48k 4y ago
I had a similar experience as a kid when making a game in BASIC. The player could choose their difficulty level, with higher difficulty levels having less obstacles for the player to hide behind. My code to calculate the number of obstacles looked like 'if diff=10 then obs=1; if diff=9 then obs=2; if diff=8 then obs=3; etc.' My dad looked at it, deleted all ten lines, replaced them with 'obs = 11 - diff', and my jaw hit the floor.

vb234 4y ago

I’ve been tempted to teach my daughter programming with scratch. At what age did you introduce your daughter to Scratch and programming? Where there any helpful/fun guides you or she discovered along the way?

JoeOfTexas 4y ago
She uses it at school, but no one taught her how to use it. She has followed tutorials for making games on Roblox Studio in the past. However, kids just hit the ground running with Scratch way better than adults.
- vb234 4y ago
  That makes a lot of sense. As a lapsed programmer myself, I found the Scratch interface was not very intuitive.
sokoloff 4y ago
I introduced to my kids at around 6 and 8. 6 was maybe a little early, but not much (and will vary by kid, of course). One thing that really added to the fun when they were making games is I got a PS3 controller (which is bluetooth) and connected that to the computer as a keyboard, which Scratch code can then read and use in the games. The first big (for them) project we did was: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/219423211/ https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/219423211/ They had just turned 7 and 9 when we did that and dad helped them out with a fair bit of guidance (and cribbing from other projects), but after this one, they really took to playing around with it on their own and a few times per month, I'll look over and see Adam using scratch around 5 years later. PS: There is a Scratch Jr if your kids don't seem quite old enough to have the attention span/focus for scratch.
- vb234 4y ago
  Thank you. Scratch Jr looks interesting and is probably a better introduction for my 6 year old.
jkestner 4y ago

AzzieElbab 4y ago

I code in 5 languages professionally, and I also do infrastructure and architecture. My kid is so much better than me in Scratch; it is embarrassing.

unfairly4820 4y ago

Found this piece of code long ago online , Calculator game made from a kid from Scratch... (but spelled Claculator lol) https://i.redd.it/5t9mpdhzzniz.png https://i.redd.it/5t9mpdhzzniz.png

beshur 4y ago