Scratch: Programming as Easy as Child's Play

Sounds too good to be true, right? I shall confess to my utter nerdiness by telling you a little secret about my childhood - I first got on to programming on a Commodore 64, back in the day when they still had tape drives to read programs. OK, this will confine me to the history books for some of you, but I can tell you that at the time I was very envious of my friend who had a 5.25" floppy drive.. OK OK, enough dwelling in the past, but needless to say - programming in those days involved either the Basic programming language with code on numbered lines and a lot of complex if this then goto something else, or if you were really hard core, you were into Machine code, which to the untrained eye simply looked like a jumble of letters and numbers. As the story went in those days, Basic was the long convoluted way to do things and Machine code was the efficient way to squeeze power out of the machine.

I know, I know - but in the day before we even had desktops and mice, it was simply wonderful to manage to get a sprite (the name for a graphic element made up of pixels) moving across the screen, but somehow incredibly painstaking and not very rewarding. READ: it didn't sustain my interest for very long. Instead I moved on to music and even figured out machine code, but only in terms of converting notes into music the computer would play. Sounds crazy, but the hexadecimal system was actually very efficient at dealing with notes, instruments and even how hard a note was played for such an otherwise simplistic system. Even to this day I believe you can still go on iTunes and subscribe to a pod-cast of tunes made exclusively with Commodore 64s..

Anyway - to make a long story short; my adventures into programming land started with Commodore 64 and remained somewhat sporadic until I got carried away with HTML, Macromedia Director and Flash, but still, simplicity was a far cry from what those programs required you to know and learn before even attempting to create functionality. If only things had been as simple and easy to get your head around as the newly launched Scratch programming language! Given the amount of interest exploding around this you may also want to check out this link, which goes to the weblog on Scratch.

The beauty of Scratch is that it is like building with LEGO bricks, each block is a behaviour or function - you just snap them together on screen, visually! rather than with complex strings of words and references - to create more complex behaviours and strings of functionality and moreover, you concentrate on WHAT you want the program to do rather than HOW to accomplish it. The how almost becomes an intuitive consequence of deciding what you want to do in the first place and kids all over the world are already embracing it, creating animations, games, movies all sorts of things from this great box of tools. A timely reminder of the fact that we should not get bogged down by our tools, but our tools should indeed be an intuitive interface to enact upon an idea.

Here are some links to articles written about the public launch of Scratch yesterday

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6647011.stm?ls
http://www.boston.com/business/globe/articles/2007/05/15/with_simplified_code_programming_becomes_childs_play/
  http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/15/1420238
  http://digg.com/software/Scratch_A_New_Programming_Language_to_Introduce_Kids_to_Coding
  http://news.com.com/8301-10784_3-9719468-7.html
  http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/may07/comments/1817
  http://www.huliq.com/21750/creating-from-scratch
  http://www.macworld.co.uk/education/news/index.cfm?newsid=18035&pagtype=allchandate
  http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=2070
  http://crunchgear.com/2007/05/15/scratch-because-your-kid-cant-do-fortran/

Comments

[DG]

This is interesting. I checked it out. Good job on the folks at MIT for this interesting creation. Very clever.

Just one thing. After decades of kids learning to program without needing graphical coddling, why is this needed now? Are today's kids stupider than the author of this post who programmed for the C64? Or what?

How will this help?

[redware]

Scratch is great. I have had no problems getting my six year old son and seven year old niece starting to program. Hopefully they will mature into writing games with scratch instead of just playing other people's games. I have posted tutorials for parents and teachers at http://www.redware.com/scratch/. Enjoy teaching your kids...

[Shane]

Three words: No silver bullet.

[Tijmoe]

Your post started well, cause I've also start on a C64 (yes, SID was fabulous for the times...)

But about Scratch... I prefer to not comment... (Humm... I've try to load the sample ping-pong game, and it crashed my machine in second...)

0/10 for Scratch, and all the tools that pretend to help "programming easy".

Programming is Hard and will always be Hard.

[Cecilia]

I don't know - I look forward to the day when our creativity doesn't have to be constrained by those things. Life is bigger than that!

[DOA]

Oh, good, yet another generation that wont have the faintest idea how a program works (memory allocation? what's that then?). I can see Scratch on their resume right next to HTML...