[al_borland]

Scratch isn’t meant to build massive projects where everything needs to be well structured and organized. It’s meant to teach some basic concepts and give learners a quick win.

I built a little game on Scratch for my nephews. It was starting to boarder on turning into a big mess, but it was much easier than if I would have done it in an actual game engine, and one of my nephews almost instantly jumped into the code and start tweaking variables and had a great time tweaking and changing stuff, with little or no direction from me.

I think there is a lot of value in presenting code in a way that makes kids want to use it, where it feels like a toy. It should be about exploration. “Structured learning” sounds like school, and isn’t always the best way to learn. Scratch lets them learn by doing, through experimentation. That’s how I like to learn.

At some point if the kid wants to keep going, they will need to graduate to something else, but at least at that point they should have a general idea what variables, conditionals, etc are and an understanding of basic logic. Those skills will translate to every other language.

[actfrench]

Thank you so much! Very helpful to see how it's a foundation for moving on to other tools.