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by wiredfool 5338 days ago
I'm doing scratch with some middle school students (grade (6-8). Most of them got looping within a class or two. Hell, we had kids doing chase games in the first hour and a half of messing with it. Oe of the kids now is working on space invaders, and star ting to get where scratch falls down on maintainability and repeating onesself. and the royal pita it is when you can't type in things, and have to rely on shaky mouse movement.

At some point soon, I'm planning on moving to something where they can distribute what they're doing, either as JavaScript, or pygame, or something. I'm hoping to be able to literally translate a scratch program to the n+1 environment so that they can see the equivalence of the looping constructs and the event handlers and everything else.
1 comments
tikhonj 5338 days ago
I think JavaScript would be a great option here: you could have them show off what they've written online, the language makes drawing pretty pictures and the like relatively easy and JavaScript is simply a nice language overall.

I can't imagine anything that would have pleased me more than being able to show off my own web site when I was that age. Of course, making silly web sites for myself is how I got into programming in the first place, so I'm probably biased ;)

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wiredfool 5337 days ago
Right now, The plusses on javascript are:

* Runs everywhere. It's the BASIC of this age * It's not that bad. * They can do stuff their friends can see

I'd rather do python, since it's that much cleaner, less curly braces and semicolons and better loops. But, the results aren't as public, and it's a harder environment to set up. And given that I have to work with the school's IT, I think I'm going to be lucky that we can load chrome on the system.

So, clarity for teaching, or ubiquity. Still deciding.

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