Teach kids coding with Scratch
Updated: Nov 16, 2020
Scratch is a free educational programming language that was developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). By learning scratch children can program interactive media such as stories, games, and animations. Primarily targeted for kids between 8-16 years, it does not use text. Instead it is a drag and drop graphical user interface that makes use of attachable blocks to be arranged in sequence to form an algorithm. Being block based kids don’t get stuck with any compiler or run time error, that may otherwise can take much time in understanding and solving without a deep technical knowledge or assistance.
While doing such fun activities through programming they not only get creative but also learn to think systematically and become resilient because of the nature of coding skill. Additionally they can easily share their creations with the world and thus also learn to collaborate in a community.
You can explore all the games made by scratchers and create your own and share on scratch website here https://scratch.mit.edu/explore/projects/all
A simple example of how block based coding of a simple hide and seek game look like in scratch:
Here is a preview of how scratch graphical user interface looks like. There are 3 panels in the scratch editor.
1. Code Blocks Panel: This panel lists all types of code blocks scratch offers. You can drag and drop these blocks to the programming panel. These blocks stick and fix into each other similar to lego.
2. Programming Panel: This panel is where you drag and drop the blocks to create your programs.
3. Preview Panel/Area: This is the area where you can test and preview your program by pressing the green flag button present on the top left.
Scratch editor is available for programming online here: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/editor/ Or if you want to make your scratch programs offline, without the need of any internet, then you can download offline scratch editor. The editor is available for mac as well as for windows. Scratch For Desktop
https://scratch.mit.edu/download
More about Scratch on :
SIP (Scratch In Practice):
So what are you going to create with Scratch?
Feel free to contact me if you have questions. :)