Showing posts with label MIT. Show all posts
Showing posts with label MIT. Show all posts

Saturday, November 1, 2014

Scratch from MIT & Back to School

As time goes on, having a knowing how to write in a programming language is becoming less of an odd and obscurantist lifestyle choice and more of a necessity for gainful employment. Already, anyone wanting to pursue a career in the hard scientists will be finding themselves either developing or working with custom applications. But even entry-level and intern positions frequently have a "please help us with our website / CMS / database" component to them.

The trouble is, people are terrified of code; even very smart people. It looks like ancient greek. For students of ancient greek it looks like Farsi. For Persian students of the Asiatic classics it looks like, err, English, probably. My point is that going from using the internet for Facebook and using the internet for push requests on Github has a very steep learning curve. So steep that most people fall right the hell off the curve.

Enter Scratch. Scratch is an object oriented programming language developed by the Smarty Pantses at MIT. What makes Scratch unique is that every component of the language is graphical; each variable and operand is a colorful building block that you can stick together in your Browser's Flash player, like puzzle pieces. Each puzzle piece only fits together when the instructions that those pieces represent can follow one another logically.

There is a lot here for the layman to enjoy - plenty of plain English Help documentation, sets of components that are based entirely around easy to understand concepts (like motion, for example), and a surprisingly active community of people who are posting some pretty amazing projects with a very limited array of tools. Some clever folks have even made very limited OS emulators.

I came across Scratch myself because I have started taking a few classes at Harvard. Despite a career working as a systems administrator, when I first attended university almost 15 years ago I was fairly certain that I would end up a humanities teacher. Most of my first go round at school was spent with the classics and modern analytic philosophy

The philosophy bit, while never ceasing to get a laugh out of co-workers, has ended up being directly applicable to my career. Having an in depth Ludwig Wittgenstein's logic tables has been very useful when dealing with arrays, for example. The writers that held the most interest for me were logicians - Boole, Whitehead, Russel; people whose work formed the original building blocks of what is now Computer Science.

Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself. So - I'm taking some classes at Harvard. Because I was a humanities concentrator, I find myself back at the basics. Intro to Computer Science I, or CS50; which has now overtaken Intro to Economics as the largest class in the entire school. Everyone wants their own f*cking `start-up`, I'm sure.

So the first week of this course had me and about 800 eager young minds getting briefed on MIT's Scratch and writing teeny little scratch applications.

Many, many years ago, when I was a very young lad, I had a very special relationship with computers. Things were much different then. Simply knowing how to operate the thing for any task other than word processing made you a bit special (not always in a good way). I had an acoustic coupler and a toshiba *laptop* with dual floppy drives. I could log onto BBS from pay-phones with my coupler. But before I could do even that, there was "Gorillas" and there was QBASIC. Each line of instructions with its only little number in front so the computer didn't get confused. I pored over each line of Gorillas to see how it worked. I broke it; I fixed it; I changed the color of the Gorillas. I made the bananas go faster.

What I'm getting at here is that early Microsoft crap gets me a bit misty eyed and nostalgic. So for my first week project, I made a clone of Windows 95-era Microsoft paint that I named "simple_paint". The pencil, brush, eraser, paint can and circle tool work; the default is the pencil - just click the icon of the tool you want to use from the toolbar on the left, just a you would in the original MS Paint. All of the colors at the bottom work, and the current color icon works, too. Be gentle, its my very first go at using Scratch, and quite a middling example of what can be accomplished. For example, here is a much better example of how to use Scratch to create a wee graphics application.

As time permits, why not give it a go and see what you can make? You can also "remix" my editor if you think you can do better. Start off by using my code base and go from there (a remix is what they call a branch in the super-cool Scratch community).

This is all highly recommended for teachers and educators, btw. If I had come across this as a kid ... it would have changed things. Scratch is completely unintimidating and the ease with which users can begin assimilating and building onto otherwise complex topics is very cool and very unique.

UPDATE: Getting into Harvard can be tough. That's why I will be posting all of my course notes and projects for my classes online. If you can't make a class, or got course materials online but can't attend lectures, or just missed a lecture, you are welcome to get your notes here!

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