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We use scratch and its clones phratch/snap/bingo at our local coderdojo to great effect. Today I discovered Dr Scratch http://drscratch.programamos.es http://dr

by dmoo 12y ago

We use scratch and its clones phratch/snap/bingo at our local coderdojo to great effect. Today I discovered Dr Scratch http://drscratch.programamos.es http://drscratch.programamos.es which does an analysis on your code.

deeviant 12y ago
I teach a game programming club for kids in grade 6-8 I'm split on scratch. On the surface it was easy to get the kids to engage, but I didn't really feel it led to much understanding of programming as a whole. And it did not seem to hold their attention for very long. I switched to C# XNA, with a good number of my own convenience libraries and boiler plates that allowed the kids to dig in and they haven't looked back. It's just very sad that Microsoft dumped XNA, and also that it's locked to windows which caused a lot of problems(basically only 30% of the kids had access to a windows PC and the club basically had to provide the kids access to a windows PC lab to work, which prevented many kids from being able to work on their games outside of the lab). I'm continuing to look for another framework like XNA that has a sufficiently easy barrier to entry(with a good amount of guidance from teachers/club leaders), while really introducing the kids to programming. For reference, here is a github snapshot of an example project I took the kids through with great success a few years back: https://github.com/zeewheeler/space_shooter_vgpc.git https://github.com/zeewheeler/space_shooter_vgpc.git
- DLarsen 12y ago
  My son and I have been having some fun with Gosu (https://github.com/jlnr/gosu https://github.com/jlnr/gosu). No problems so far running it on Windows and Ubuntu.
  - radiorental 12y ago
    How old did you start with your son?
  - ChristerNilsson 12y ago
    Gosu is good, and Chingu on top of that is even better. https://github.com/ippa/chingu https://github.com/ippa/chingu
- technomancy 12y ago
  I have had great experiences with Scratch, but I agree that it's not great for kids in middle school. My kids are just starting elementary, and they love it to death. For middle-school and up kids I would unreservedly recommend Racket. The curriculum at http://htdp.org http://htdp.org is far and away the best introduction to programming concepts I've ever seen.

by dmoo 12y ago

deeviant 12y ago

I teach a game programming club for kids in grade 6-8 I'm split on scratch. On the surface it was easy to get the kids to engage, but I didn't really feel it led to much understanding of programming as a whole. And it did not seem to hold their attention for very long. I switched to C# XNA, with a good number of my own convenience libraries and boiler plates that allowed the kids to dig in and they haven't looked back. It's just very sad that Microsoft dumped XNA, and also that it's locked to windows which caused a lot of problems(basically only 30% of the kids had access to a windows PC and the club basically had to provide the kids access to a windows PC lab to work, which prevented many kids from being able to work on their games outside of the lab). I'm continuing to look for another framework like XNA that has a sufficiently easy barrier to entry(with a good amount of guidance from teachers/club leaders), while really introducing the kids to programming. For reference, here is a github snapshot of an example project I took the kids through with great success a few years back: https://github.com/zeewheeler/space_shooter_vgpc.git https://github.com/zeewheeler/space_shooter_vgpc.git

DLarsen 12y ago
My son and I have been having some fun with Gosu (https://github.com/jlnr/gosu https://github.com/jlnr/gosu). No problems so far running it on Windows and Ubuntu.
- radiorental 12y ago
  How old did you start with your son?
- ChristerNilsson 12y ago
  Gosu is good, and Chingu on top of that is even better. https://github.com/ippa/chingu https://github.com/ippa/chingu
technomancy 12y ago
I have had great experiences with Scratch, but I agree that it's not great for kids in middle school. My kids are just starting elementary, and they love it to death. For middle-school and up kids I would unreservedly recommend Racket. The curriculum at http://htdp.org http://htdp.org is far and away the best introduction to programming concepts I've ever seen.