How Scratch Is Feeding Hacker Values into Young Minds (backchannel.com)

Reader mirandakatz writes: It's the 10th anniversary of Scratch, the kids programming language that's become a popular tool for training the next generation of minds in computer science. But as Steven Levy writes at Backchannel, Scratch's real value is how it imparts lessons in sharing, logic, and hackerism: 'A product of the MIT Media Lab, Scratch is steeped in a complicated set of traditions -- everything from educational philosophy to open source activism and the pursuit of artificial life. The underpinnings of this tool subtly, and sometimes not so subtly, convey a set of values through its use... These values include reverence of logic, an unshakeable belief in the power of collaboration, and a celebration of the psychic and tangible rewards of being a maker.'

Comments

Flash

[darkain]

Just tried this out because I was curious. It requires Adobe Flash. Already lost interest, sadly. And it looked kinda cool to tinker with, too!

Re:Flash

[avandesande]

Can't you just pretend that Flash is a cornerstone of open source activism?

Never used that "language" but have an anecdote

[CustomSolvers2]

While giving a programming advice to an anonymous, probably-native-English-speaker someone, I said something about writing the code from scratch and that person answered "No. I want to learn a proper language". Back then I didn't even know what this Scratch was, apparently an extremely limited environment for kids to play. What puzzled me of this association of "from scratch" with a so unrelated-to-programming toy was how easily a so wrong idea appeared as evident. The programming knowledge of that person (as per our short conversation) was extremely low, most likely non-existent; but s/he wasn't aware about that fact, perhaps because of having once used this Scratch thing and assuming that this was all what programming was. I don’t remember the exact question, but it was a very simple concept like why the loop was showing 2 in the second iteration? who wasn’t able to grasp despite my explanations; was expecting an even simpler explanation?!.

I cannot be against what I don't know (as said, never really used that thing) and much less regarding a field outside my expertise like educating kids, but am certainly against pseudo-/partially-/dishonestly-educating people by over-simplifying what isn't simple. This is especially important in fields like programming, which are usually associated with long learning periods and where only certain types of personalities tend to succeed. Knowing a bit of everything sounds good to me, but only within the right context (e.g., real-life applicability of that knowledge).

Re:Never used that "language" but have an anecdote

[CustomSolvers2]

As said, teaching kids isn't my work. If experts consider that learning Scratch is better, I guess that I would agree with them. I was just trying to highlight that learning the actual applicability of the given knowledge is also very important. People with a distorted perception of the real value of their knowledge might be even more problematic than those not having that knowledge.

Scratch is a noble idea, but so limited...

[MindPrison]

I live in Sweden, I've been invited to those so called scratch introductory courses, because I sometimes work as a substitute teacher, and now - Scratch has been introduced to the Swedish learning institution because the government has finally realized we need to get kids to code (which I fully agree with BTW.)

But scratch?

Not sure about that. I tried introducing the kids at my school to Arduino - and they went NUTS with happiness and excitement. Why? Because it was that much cooler. The kids are not idiots, they immediately recognized scratch as some 4 year old pedagogical learning tool made to be a "learning tool" instead of something cool they would actually use in their everyday life. Arduino on the other hand, when they could plug some 2 dollar electrical device into their laptops and code on it, and leave the code on the device to perform interesting functions like sensing light, moving a motor around, checking a switch or displaying something cool on an oled display - now THIS is what got the kids, not that pedagogical "make that flash-like-cat-thing-move-on-the-screen" stuff.