Version 1.4 will be able to fit better in smaller screens, such as netbooks or older computers.
Re:Scratch Helps Kids Get With the Program
by jasongullickson on Thursday May 14, 2009 @02:16PM
(#609285)
That is great news. I considered getting her an OLPC to replace the Mac but this particular limitation made me pause.
I'm particularly impressed with the way they modeled loops, which is always a hard thing to explain to new developers.
I remember trying to learn Perl from one of the O'Reily books when I was 11 or 12. I was following the examples and generally enjoying myself until I came to one with a while loop. I was ticked off that it was looping automatically and I couldn't see why. I was expecting that I needed to say when to go back to the beginning of the block. ...maybe c would have been better then.
The only problem we had to do with the amount of screen real estate needed, she had a 12" iBook with a 1024x768 display and it was almost unusably cramped. On modern machines, I'm sure it would be no problem.
The great thing about Squeak is it lets you do some cool stuff first and learn the hard stuff later, once you've built up some momentum without throwing away the principles common to almost all software development platforms.