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

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.