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- Hacker News
- Scratch's problem is ecosystem. It develops UX for children who are still early to the keyboard but children learn so fast, and at some point they get past the high friction stage and end up in a desert.by threatofrain
- I understand why people value the code John Carmack has released but I do not understand why people value his public statements.
"eventually id Tech 5 is going to be open source also. This is still the law of the land at id"[0]
"Great! I think Microsoft has been a good parent company for gaming IPs"[1]
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20081003111457/http://www.linuxg...
by RunSet - I can say it has for me. I spent a couple years on scratch as a kid before moving on to other languages, and it helped me really get into programming.
My hobby projects are almost always video games to this day, partially because of it. I even built my first compiler/interpreter on there before I knew what those words meant, and got exposed to lots of math that I otherwise wouldn't have seen until high school. Being able to easily discover what others were doing, and learn from their projects, helped me out a lot.
It will always be special to me, as I'm sure BASIC and such are to others.
by jim-works - I loved Scratch as a kid and got really deep into it. Not sure if I could call myself a "success story" but it did get me much more comfortable with programming!
Before Scratch I think the two biggest barriers in my childhood programming experiments were 1) Remembering all the different syntax and function names, and 2) Being bored by the basic CLI programs that all tutorials started with. Scratch helped with both of those. It had a palette with all possible commands available to you, it was impossible to make syntax errors, and it was visually-oriented so I could dive right into making games. Lowering those barriers helped me learn how to structure code in a fun way, so when I did eventually go back to the "real" languages I felt much less lost.
I also remember really loving the social features, getting comments on my work, and collaborating with people.
I'd love to see more experimentation in this area, there's definitely potential for a more modernized educational language that builds on these ideas.
by chroma_zone - I was a naysayer before I had kids, too. I now am able to get a first person view of Scratch usage through my child who likes the platform very much.
What's missing in a lot of these discussions about Scratch efficacy is the community aspect. Kids like getting a response in the comments section from their peers and many of the alternatives proposed don't have that. Without an active community, a lot of kids might never use the alternative despite being "better". In the case of Scratch (unlike Khan academy, which he completed also), he keeps using it, keeps trying things and keeps coming back because of the rewarding community interactions.
by rickcarlino - Ive been volunteering with a foster kid for a number of years now (8 -> 10 year old) . We would build robotic kits, Lego and work through origami books. If problems came up, most of time he would say 'it's too hard' and give up.
I introduced him to scratch the other month. I have loved his excitement when he builds the simplest things. I've seen him run into problems where I thought his attitude of 'it's too hard' would come to the surface. He tackled them head on, figured out where the bug was and supplied a fix.
I hope he has a fulfilling career in CS or sciences in general. So I sincerely hope scratch and this experience builds up his confidence and beak the cycle of poverty and drug abuse
by Aquitard - It's not always your first exposure that you later identify as a catalyst.
I'm an American that took a C++ class in Europe when I was 13 (forward thinking school in retrospect). But when asked, I usually say scripting RS bots was what got me into the field, because I had fun and it was more memorable.
But would I have chosen to do that had I no idea what coding was? Maybe not...
by kylecazar - I worked with some of the folks who introduced coding into school districts way back when that movement started, so I have a bit of inside knowledge.
The biggest anecdote I'd share is that learning to code as early as 1st grade unexpectedly led to children taking the ability to troubleshoot problems and using it across all their subjects in school. They started to treat struggles in other classes as debugging assignments: "What went wrong? What do I need to fix?" Their entire attitude changed from pass/fail into optimization. It has led to academic improvements across entire school districts, which was not at all expected but was a delightful surprise.
So the question posed seems fairly irrelevant to me. Maybe some of those kids grew up to be coders, maybe they did not. Either way, it helped their education.
by codingdave