Today I tried to explain my 6 years old daughter what programming means and what an algorithm does. I encountered scratchjr and was impressed how fast she “wrote” her first program on the ipad.
Even if you’re not part of the Kindergarten demographic, you should think about Scratch if you want to teach someone the basics of programming.
Scratch is a visual programming language developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group of the MIT Media Lab. The name of the developing group should give you a hint about both the language’s purpose and its target audience.
Scratch is part of a unified development environment that allows you to create games, make visualizations from math and science data, produce your own animated clips, and do other things. In addition, there are modules that allow Scratch to interface with external hardware so you can use Scratch to program your Lego Mindstorms modules if you’re ready to move beyond the Lego block programming model. Scratch is free and part of a huge user community, so it might be a good tool for taking care of your “learning to program” itch.
