I’m thinking of starting a local group for kids (8-12 yo) to learn programming using Scratch.
Do you have any pointers that I might consider?
For reference, I’m a senior developer and architect, the programming part will probably be the easiest of it all.
I genuinely don’t know if scratch is the right choice or a simple text based language would be better, especially for the older kids. Just from my personal experience, I started programming in BASIC at 12 and don’t think I would have had as much fun and continued programming if i had used scratch instead.
Well yea, I was 9 when I started programming in Batch, but it is not really suited for every kid. Most kids aren’t nerds. Some may have problem reading and formatting code correctly, let alone understanding anything not seen before. Scratch mostly takes care of that.
It’s meant for absolute beginners and while there are quite a few talented people, you can’t really expect 12yo kids in general to understand and, more importantly, enjoy writing BASIC.
I would use python instead of BASIC, if it was me. I also started with BASIC as a kid, but I remember each step up language wise (BASIC -> Pascal -> C) being a big satisfaction of “hey, it seems like this language is a lot better and I can do more with it.” I would echo the recommendation to use actual code though. Language is pretty deeply hard-wired into human beings, and I suspect that the kids that will do well with breaking tasks down into scratch primitives would do equally well with python, and the kids who find python “too hard” or something would also not be able to do too much with scratch. Maybe I am wrong, but that’s my guess.
My only other thought is to have some kind of graphical / game you can play / real world robotics angle to it. Maybe there’s a little graphical ecosystem pre-provided, and they can write agents that can interact within the ecosystem and then see a visual representation of what everyone’s agents are doing. I would definitely recommend to have a bunch of code that they can read, though; that was where my programming as a kid took a big step forward, was when I got a big disk filled with programs I could analyze and break down.