I was reading a post on Feld Thoughts about an new programming language developed at MIT called Scratch. It sounded good, so I thought I better download it and have a look at it to see if it was suitable for my eight year old daughter - she's very bright and I've been trying to find a way to introduce her to programming for a while but couldn't find the right tool.
I downloaded Scratch and she was up and playing with it in no time at all. She created an animation with her own sprites and had them moving around the screen.
The developers of Scratch clearly put a lot of thought into it. What's cool about Scratch:
- It has it's own very cool IDE. This includes color coded building blocks for different language construct categories.
- The building blocks make it very easy for young kids but they aren't too childish so that even an adult can enjoy playing with it.
- By building in the easy to use animation tools, they have made it fun from the start.
- There is a community growing around it from their site where kids can share their creations and use and comment on other people's creations.
My daughter enjoyed it so much she now has the other kids in the neighborhood downloading and playing with it. And I have other friends and colleagues who have downloaded Scratch for their kids.
The website is full of some really neat programs created using Scratch ,including this Archery game. (Its only drawback being the annoying Scarborough Fair background music).
IP Babble is the personal blog of William Henry.
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