let’s give credit where it’s due. the almost entirely reprehensible tories have done one truly brilliant thing: they announced a couple of years ago that computer lessons where kids just learnt to use microsoft office were not sufficient, so they were going to give all children lessons in coding.

what this actually means is that they’re getting seven-to-eight-year-olds and putting them in front of scratch.

and so you have pink-dress-wearing, my little pony loving girly girls like my daughter and her friends playing with scratch, making animations and learning the concept that things are programmable. that everything their computer does is a more complicated version of a scratch animation with dancing ballerinas.

(freda asks me to note that the letter icons and the background in the above example are sprites that come with scratch.)



the school version is the standalone runtime. (the windows version works well under wine on linux.) however, the kid can go to scratch.mit.edu and make a login. and what happens there? they learn to SHARE PROJECTS and SWAP CODE WITH OTHER PEOPLE.

it is difficult for me to put into words just how highly i approve of this. i don’t know what genius inveigled themselves into the ministry of education (apparently these ones), but this is just unbelievably awesome. i’m watching the kid right now, animating bouncing ball and and cat sprites and making her animation play sounds and making her own version of Pong, and flapping her hands with joy like she’s going to take flight.

the very concept of programmability is rarer than you probably think. i was on a perl-for-web-developers course several years ago; it took one webdev two hours to realise that computers follow a precise list of instructions for every single thing they do. they’d never consciously understood this before. and the person in question was neither stupid nor an incompetent webdev. their eyes lit up in epiphany as many things about the world suddenly made sense.

(the kids do learn “textual languages” as well later on, don’t worry.)



so, scratch. if you aren’t fortunate enough to live somewhere with a school system that does this, get your kid onto scratch.mit.edu and get them making stuff. or if you yourself have never programmed something. DO IT. you will be delighted.

edit: followup

