scratch: coding for kiddies

scratch: coding for kiddies

Just a quick one to say that this new bit of software actually looks quite good. It’s basically a WYSIWYG coding type of thing which produces stuff that looks a bit similar to what you can do in Flash (or Director).

Straight from the beeb:

“Computer programming has been traditionally seen as something that is beyond most people – it’s only for a special group with technical expertise and experience,” said Professor Mitchel Resnick, one of the researchers at the Lifelong Kindergarten group at MIT.

“We have developed Scratch as a new type of programming language, which is much more accessible.”

It sounds okay and it looks okay too.. Frankly, anything that can introduce coding (in some form or another) to people gets the thumbs up from me. Not because I think that everyone should know how to code, but it would be nice if those people who are interested in it could start early. However, the thing that; “they don’t have to worry about the obscure punctuation and syntax common in most programming languages,” is potentially worrying because it slightly takes away from the actual nature of programming languages surely(?) Blah.. we’ll see in 15 years or so when the generation of ‘scratch’ people come up with Web 5.0 or whatever it’ll be.

Generally though, looks good.

Alas, due to (presumably) a massive amount of traffic, I cant actually get on to the actual site just yet so details are still fairly sketchy for me.. Like, what can you do with these animations? What do they export as? etc etc.. Blah.. I’ll be popping back to give it another look.. As should you 🙂