I was reading Wesley Fryer’s post on getting his first Scratch lesson from his 9 year old. It piqued my interest because I had heard of this application awhile back when it was just in the early development stages. I had noted it in my mind as something very important, and I needed to look into this later. However, I’d forgotten, but now I have found it again thanks to Wesley.
I spent a little time playing around with it, as I think it is one of those innovative learning applications I can learn a lot from.
I started playing some of the games people had already programmed. I started with some mirror game that was amusing. You had to bounce the beam of a laser with mirrors until it a monkey. Come to think of it. It sounds quite cruel, but I was impressed.
I then moved on to a childhood classic. Duck Hunt! Holy cow! It was like an exact copy of the original Nintendo version. The only difference was that I didn’t have a gun. However, I found myself much better at this version since it used a mouse. I have to thank my years playing first person shooters for that. Anyway, I realized the sheer potential if what you could do.
So then I downloaded the application itself. My impressions were that it was very well made and had a nice polish to it. I’ve seen some pretty ugly open source applications in my day.
My goal was to see how quickly I could figure the environment out without looking at a manual. I started to play around with the objects.
Code was being represented as a puzzle piece. Instead of typing things out, you just simply connect different objects together. The interesting thing is that it is a very visually oriented application. You start by programming actions behind a sprite (graphic), which quickly derailed my mind of creating a Hello World application even though I could.
I’m a very visual person, and it was fun to explore and try to connect different pieces together. I started adding more sprites and gave them actions based on clicks.
I have to say that it really felt like programming. I felt my head starting to work as I was trying to make my first simple application. It was the same type of logical mental work I do when programming with traditional languages. The first thought that came to my head was that this would be a great starter program to introduce programming to people.
I did get frustrated, but that was because I wanted to do something I knew how to do in line based coding. At 22 years old, it’s not easy to teach an old dog new tricks. Even though I haven’t spent enough time, I can see where the limitations are. However, the limitations are more based on trying make the application do what another language is better suited to do.
Overall, I think it’s an amazing tool. I hope to gain more experience playing around with it, and read what first time programmers think about it. I’m always trying to see what I can learn from current innovators of learning software.
Link to official website: http://scratch.mit.edu/
Thanks for reading,
Carl Zetterlund
P.S. Click here for the silly program I made while messing around. It’s not very good.
