MIT Media Lab Making Programming Fun For Kids

An anonymous reader passed us a link to an article on the Boston Globe's website, talking up efforts by MIT to make programming a non-threatening part of grade-school education. MIT has developed a new programming language designed to encourage experimentation and play. Called Scratch, the project eschews manuals and high-level concepts in favour of approachability. "Efforts to make computer programming accessible to young people began in the late 1970s with the advent of the personal PC, when another programming language with roots at MIT — Logo — allowed young people to draw shapes by steering a turtle around a screen by typing out commands. But the path to mastering most programming languages has been strewn with obstacles, since students needed to figure out not only the underlying logic but also master a brand new syntax, observe strict rules about semicolons and bracket use, and figure out what was causing error messages even as they learned the program."

What?!

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean BASIC isn't fun? It was fun for me... but maybe that's why I'm reading Slashdot now.

Now if only they could make programmers

[antifoidulus]

not frightening to children....or women for that matter :P

Just think...

[spungo]

Just think of all the Microsoft patents these kids can now infringe!

Clearly

[Dr. Smoove]

Logo and scratch aren't really relevant for kids to learn at a young age. This is what C and assembly are for.

from scratch...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm, http://scratch.mit.edu/ [mit.edu] is now slashdotted.
I guess they have to build their webserver from scratch now!

BBC Scratch Article with Video

[Blue Stone]

BBC Scratch Article with Flash Video [bbc.co.uk]

Oh great

[glwtta]

Now all they need to do is ship this on the OLPC, to make sure all US programming jobs are obliterated 10 years from now.

Re:Real Women Aren't Afraid to Program

[kalidasa]

He's not talking about making "programming" less frightening to women, but "computer programmers" less frightening to women (i.e., pimply-faced male coders who cannot, for the life of them, get a date with the opposite sex). Of course, he either assumes that all programmers are male, or that gay female programmers are equally impaired in the search for a prospective partner.

Tomorrow on Sesame Street

[Dancindan84]

Grover, "Hey kids! The word of the day is... Recursion! Brought to you by the color #CCCCFF"

Re:Been there?

[ericlondaits]

You draw a turtle with LOGO? What is that, the soviet russian version of LOGO?

Re:Lego Logo

[TodMinuit]

Pfft. You whippersnappers have it easy! I had to wire my logic gates by hand, and that's the ways I likes it! That was after I mined the copper to make the wires! Plus, I had to use an exercise bike to generate the electricity to power the damn thing!!!

Welp

[SydBarrett]

I just downloaded Scratch and in a few minutes made a picture of a pig move around the screen while rotating and making fart noises. Honestly, this is all I really want out of any programming language.

Re:Logo? Meh.

[leighklotz]

From what I remember of Logo, few people in the class "got" it. Everyone in CS harps on and on about how great logo is, but most of my classmates in grade-school just laughed when the "turtle" did stupid things, and asked the teacher for help (ie, to fix it for them.)

Yes, one of the big failings of Logo is that although it had the potential to help make kids smarter, it couldn't do anything about the teachers.

Disclaimer: I wrote Logo for the C64, Apple II, and Mac.

lets see

[AlgorithMan]

lets see...

PRINT "Hello World!"

uh... what errorlevel does this return (which I can catch in batch scripts)?
and what libraries does this code use (i.e. how big will the program become)?
is the PRINT procedure buffered (i.e. faster) or unbuffered (i.e. uses less ram)?
is the string "Hello World!" a list (faster manipulatable) or an array (less ram, faster nonlinear access) of characters?
what charset do strings use?
can I overload the operators to get useful classes?
could I replace the libraries with own asm code to make the programs smaller/faster?
and is this an LR(1) grammar? missing delimiters (like ";") might screw up the language, the parse-trees might not be unique...

yes, basic is convenient, simple and intuitive... for beginners...
to professionals it's just a child's toy