Scratch is awesome for kids. My kids love it. My older daughter has afternoon lessons at school, and I help her debug her projects if there is a problem. I am not sure how I would teach her, if I had to start from zero.
I found a few videos on how to make games in Scratch, and I learned a lot about Scratch from them, but sometimes the author uses in the algorithm a mathematical expression that seems a bit too complicated for a small child. For example, how to make a moving object stop right before the wall. Like, if it moves 10 pixels each turn, and the wall is 5 pixels ahead, you want it to go 5 pixels at the last step; neither 10 nor 0. The author’s solution is to go 10 pixels forward, and then “repeat 10 times: if there is a collision with the wall, go 1 pixel back”. (Collisions of pictures are a primitive operation in Scratch.) That sounds trivial, but because the speed could be 10 pixels per turn or −10 pixels for turn, and it’s not even guaranteed to be an integer, the algorithm becomes “repeat ceil(abs(V)) times: if there is a collision with the wall, go V/ceil(abs(V)) pixels back”, and which point my daughter just says “I don’t get it”. (This is not a problem with Scratch per se; you could limit the speed to integer, and maybe avoid the absolute value by using an if-statement and doing the positive and negative values separately; and maybe ceil(abs(V)) could be a local variable. I am just saying that the videos are generally great… but you get one or two moments of this per video.)
In a bookstore I found a translation of Carol Vorderman’s Computer Coding For Kids, which seems good (so it’s going to be a Christmas present); the first 1⁄3 of the book is Scratch, the remaining 2⁄3 are Python.
.
I like the definition of disorder as domination of public space for private purposes. As I see it, the problem with informal systems of preventing disorder is that some people are resistant to shame; specifically:
assholes
criminals
homeless
mentally ill
drug addicts
teenagers, when encouraged by other teenagers (unless you happen to know their parents)
Once your neighborhood becomes a favorite place of these, you either need a strong community (the kind that can summon a group of adult men with baseball bats, who would ask the disorderly people to kindly leave and never set their foot in this neighborhood again), or you have to call the police. Or you give up your public space.
Scratch is awesome for kids. My kids love it. My older daughter has afternoon lessons at school, and I help her debug her projects if there is a problem. I am not sure how I would teach her, if I had to start from zero.
I found a few videos on how to make games in Scratch, and I learned a lot about Scratch from them, but sometimes the author uses in the algorithm a mathematical expression that seems a bit too complicated for a small child. For example, how to make a moving object stop right before the wall. Like, if it moves 10 pixels each turn, and the wall is 5 pixels ahead, you want it to go 5 pixels at the last step; neither 10 nor 0. The author’s solution is to go 10 pixels forward, and then “repeat 10 times: if there is a collision with the wall, go 1 pixel back”. (Collisions of pictures are a primitive operation in Scratch.) That sounds trivial, but because the speed could be 10 pixels per turn or −10 pixels for turn, and it’s not even guaranteed to be an integer, the algorithm becomes “repeat ceil(abs(V)) times: if there is a collision with the wall, go V/ceil(abs(V)) pixels back”, and which point my daughter just says “I don’t get it”. (This is not a problem with Scratch per se; you could limit the speed to integer, and maybe avoid the absolute value by using an if-statement and doing the positive and negative values separately; and maybe ceil(abs(V)) could be a local variable. I am just saying that the videos are generally great… but you get one or two moments of this per video.)
In a bookstore I found a translation of Carol Vorderman’s Computer Coding For Kids, which seems good (so it’s going to be a Christmas present); the first 1⁄3 of the book is Scratch, the remaining 2⁄3 are Python.
.
I like the definition of disorder as domination of public space for private purposes. As I see it, the problem with informal systems of preventing disorder is that some people are resistant to shame; specifically:
assholes
criminals
homeless
mentally ill
drug addicts
teenagers, when encouraged by other teenagers (unless you happen to know their parents)
Once your neighborhood becomes a favorite place of these, you either need a strong community (the kind that can summon a group of adult men with baseball bats, who would ask the disorderly people to kindly leave and never set their foot in this neighborhood again), or you have to call the police. Or you give up your public space.