I think we make a mistake in thinking programming is only for a certain “type” of person. Scratch goes way beyond that because it develops critical thinking and problem solving skills. Kids don’t need to know more “stuff”, they need to know what to do with it and how to manipulate it to make something that hasn’t been seen or done before. Exposing them to Scratch, not as a programming introduction but as an exercise in developing higher order thinking skills, serves a much higher purpose than tying it to just computer science.

I found your entry interesting do I’ve added a Trackback to it on my weblog …

How do the 2 compare?

I spent maybe a 1/2 hour with my 8-year old daughter just playing around and left her. When I came back she had figured out how to add sounds and make things move on her own. With each new thing she learned, she thought of more things to do until she had a pretty entertaining animation/game going.

The system is pretty capable. Eventually when you start to want to do really fancy things you’ll start to bump against it’s limits and have to get really creative about how to do something given the limitations (think trying to make a 3D game using only sprites), but this sort of creative thinking to get around system limitations sort of reminds me of some of the more interesting software projects I’ve had to write in real life.

Since then I’ve had several other nieces/nephews/friends get hooked after hearing how fun it was from my kids. It really is a great way to encourage kids to switch from *playing* video games to *making* video games.

BTW, I also bought the Scratch board which plugs into a USB port and lets your Scratch programs sense pretty much anything you can hook up wires to (think aluminum foil based buglar alarm). So far I’ve been more excited of the board than the kids, but I would have KILLED for something like this when I was that age.

-josh

Thus, I think it would be better to use an easy-to-understand generic language (BASIC works well, although CS people tend to dislike it) and make sure that enough easy-to-use functions for animation, interaction and sound are available.
Thus, it would not be that much harder to learn, but once the convenience toy functions are no longer sufficient one can just continue with the “real stuff” rather than having to abandon the language and start from scratch again.

Being married to an elementary school teacher, I can tell you that this has applications WAY beyond programming. This is also very much about concepts such as cause and effect (great for language arts and science,) simple logic (excellent for math skills) and a few other lesser but still important concepts like planning and other “building blocks” thought processes. I’ll be pointing the wife at this.

For myself, I’m a Delphi/FreePascal coder these days with asm thrown in for when it’s needed [and c# when my employer insists], and would probably take my children down that route if they wanted to do more coding – largely because it can be as high level as you want, or down to the metal, but at all times the structure is clear and it’s very readable. It shows order and logic, and there are ways to show somehing of how a computer works internally (memory management, how processes can be sped up, etc.)
When they have certain concepts nailed, then I’d direct them to C++ or Java. Having said that my eldest (daughter) is a very skilled ballet dancer, and so I would prefer she does what she is best at even if she does have a natural skill in manipulating virtual objects..

Still, thanks for the heads up, there’s still my 5 year old who would love to play with a virtual dog!

I think the immediacy of this looks to have real appeal – trying to explain analysis of the operational characteristics of the real world is too big a first step.

The other part of this is the teacher – I know the teach who does IT at my kids primary school. Great teacher, but the idea of even a simple language like VB being taught is frightening. This looks like it is much more within reach.