> Well, part of the motivation for blocks is that you don't need to know any special incantations. Instead of being faced with a blank text editor and a cursor,

> Well, part of the motivation for blocks is that you don't need to know any special incantations. Instead of being faced with a blank text editor and a cursor, you're given a toolbox full of toys to explore, which (for me, at least, when I was in the 5th grade) is extremely empowering. Okay, so why couldn't you do the same thing with text? If you can fit a bunch of blocks on the screen, why can't you fit a bunch of function names and keywords on the screen? > The thing is, kids using Scratch end up creating amazing stuff: I've seen recursive raytracers, real-time multiplayer-over-the-network FPS games, a chess AI (game tree + alpha/beta pruning), emulators for various video games… I can't really look at that and not describe it as programming. Okay, that is impressive. But are those same kids also writing C or Python? I've done some cool stuff with Scratch back in the day, but I don't think I could have done it if I hadn't already been pretty well-versed in HyperTalk, BASIC, and C++ (at the time). > Shape. In Scratch and Snap!, a block that returns a boolean is diamond-shaped, and holes for boolean arguments are diamond-shaped. So you can't accidentally put a number into the condition for IF--the shape literally doesn't fit. That's certainly easier to understand, but it's also far less capable. How can it handle structs (or classes)? > The way I see it, once you get them excited about computer science, the things that were too scary aren't scary anymore: they're exciting. I really hope this is true, I'm just not sure it is. However, I really hope people keep researching this and prove me wrong.