[derbOac]

My daughter uses scratch and loves it.

My sense is it's good for learning really basic programming concepts (eg, learning a while or for loop controlling a hardware output), and setting up a context for things like Python or Lua later.

[actfrench]

That's very helpful. Thank you! Did you orient her in some way or just log her in and say have fun!

[derbOac]

They use it at her school, and I've bought her some books with projects for her because she's liked to do things outside of school too (for example, ML for kids, which is odd to think about but that's what it is). We've worked through some of the projects in the book, she's made simple pong-style games, and some other things.

Her school has kind of gradually been working through apps and scratch to build up concepts. Some of the early ones were games where you had to program a route out of a maze or something like that by doing things like providing the steps (up down right left, number of each) out. That kind of led to other things, which led to other things.

It sort of built from "tell this robot how to get out of a maze" to "tell your ipad how to do X" where X got gradually more complex over the course of months or a couple of years.

[actfrench]

So cool. Thanks so much for this explanation of how Scratch is implemented in the classroom.