Re:MIT Scratch – Teach kids to program stories, games, and a...
by sdg1 on Monday December 15, 2014 @06:12PM
(#8755038)
(Member of the Scratch team here)
1) There's a super useful Scratch Curriculum guide - made by the folks from ScratchEd. http://scratched.gse.harvard.edu/resources/scratch-curriculu...
2) Blockly seems to be under the Apache license (https://github.com/google/blockly)
Re:MIT Scratch – Teach kids to program stories, games, and a...
by hardmath123 on Monday December 15, 2014 @08:39PM
(#8755496)
(5-year Scratch veteran here.)
Even though Blockly (and it's predecessor, "App Inventor") is made by Google (the great and the powerful), I have to say, I would rather be introduced to code by Scratch than by Blockly. Scratch is much simpler-looking, it has a beautiful interface, and (most importantly) it has one of the friendliest communities in case you need help or want to show off a project.
Re:MIT Scratch – Teach kids to program stories, games, and a...
by sankethkatta on Monday December 15, 2014 @06:11PM
(#8755033)
UC Berkeley's CS10 class teaches with Snap(a variant of Scratch) https://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs10/fa14/
You could get a good idea of curriculum there.
Re:MIT Scratch – Teach kids to program stories, games, and a...
by hardmath123 on Monday December 15, 2014 @08:41PM
(#8755500)
In particular, they use the BJC (Beauty and Joy of Computing) curriculum (http://bjc.berkeley.edu).
1) I have neither a computer science nor a teaching background. (I'm a self-taught web-dev hack) but I am interested in introducing local kids to programming. I helped run a couple Hour of Code sessions last week at my kids' elementary school, and I think I could get support there to start up some kind of after-school program. But I'm a bit lost as to what a good curriculum would look like. Anyone here have any pointers or suggestions?
2) I believe that Blockly (https://developers.google.com/blockly/) was the engine behind the Hour of Code exercise I used last week. It's available as a client-side library to include in your web applications, but I couldn't track down its license. It looks like, if one were to nail down a good curriculum, you could use Blockly to build a learning environment to accompany it.