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0 pointssfjailbird3y ago0 comments

That's different. You were learning from first principles, using the lowest level primitives, and how putting them together made it possible to do an almost infinite number of things. That is powerful and intoxicating.

With Scratch you are given a limited set of blocks that are designed for a limited set of solutions. It is at the same time not particularly powerful nor does it feel like you can grow your solutions to anything you have in mind.

I have three kids and have taught (or attempted to teach) each of them programming. I started with Scratch every time, but it never piqued their interest, although they understood it. I have since started them on Javascript from the very basics (Khan academy) and they are very curious about each new lesson and the weird powers it brings. YMMV but people should not assume Scratch or Mindstorms and so on are necessarily better learning environments, just because they are 'friendly' - it can be quite the contrary.

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mbrodersen3y ago

Yep I agree. I don’t think learning Scratch is a good way to learn programming. The intentions are good but IMHO misguided. Scratch is too “abstracted away” from what is really going on. Learning about the lowest possible abstraction (machine code) made it easy for me to understand everything else in programming. And the humble BASIC programming language taught a whole generation of kids how to program. So I think it is fair to state that BASIC is a proven way to teach kids the “real” stuff. Perhaps Python might be a better choice today?

sfjailbirdOP3y ago

One of the game changers from back in the day, which makes teaching 'real' programming much easier, is the proliferation of very good interactive online learning environments, like Khan, Udemy, etc.

fennecfoxy3y ago

Scratch is great for learning programming for kids/people who it doesn't come naturally to.

Natural developers like myself and plenty of others spent our childhoods hunched over a zx81/spectrum/commodore/whatever because we thought it was _cool_.

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