Do your kids like to use computers? Do they linger in the computer areas of science museums, playing with the demos? Do they eye the Lego Mindstorms robot sets until you see the nearly $300 price tag and quickly usher them away?
Here’s good news: Scratch, a programming language designed just for kids, is absolutely free. It’s a drag-and-drop system developed by the folks at the MIT Media Lab—the “Lifelong Kindergarten Group,” to be exact. (That sounds like my dream job.) With very little effort, kids can get started creating their own animations, video games, drawing programs, and whatever else strikes their imagination.
It’s not quite as tactile as Lego robots, but today’s video-game-obsessed kids might not even know the difference. It still gives them a strong sense of creating something cool. Also, computer animations, unlike Legos, don’t get stuck between your toes when you walk barefoot on the carpet. (Having said that, the latest version of Scratch can apparently be used with the Lego WeDo robotics kits (their kits for educational use; slightly cheaper than Mindstorms), but I haven’t tried that myself. WeDo seems to come with its own programming language as well.)
My six-year-old son and I have been playing around with Scratch lately. He’s not about to quit first grade and start a dotcom in our garage, but he’s getting the idea of creating a list of instructions for the onscreen objects to follow. Scratch comes with a ton of built-in graphics and sounds, and he loves picking out the ones he wants to use. We even rigged together a simple game where he moves a character around with the arrow keys and earns points as it bumps into other characters. I’m not necessarily trying to turn him into a computer science major, but I think the skills of logical thinking, testing, and problem solving carry over into many other areas.
I have done a bit of programming in my life, enough to hack a few plugins for this Web site, but I wouldn’t bill myself as a programmer. If you played around at all with BASIC as a kid, you should know enough to get started (and to be jealous of today’s kids who have these nifty new programming tools). If not, there is lots of online help, from reference guides to videos to “Scratch Cards” with simple routines you can copy. If your kids have taken any kind of introductory programming class in school, they should have enough to get going on their own—and may even have used Scratch already.
It’s a quick download for Windows or Mac—and again, it’s free.
Have any of you tried Scratch or another kid-focused programming language? What do you think? More importantly, how have your kids liked it?
Thanks for this — sounds cool. My son’s not ready for it yet (he’s only allowed to press the space bar and the mouse button), but I’ll try it on my 5-yo niece when she visits.
I remember messing around with LOGO (the little triangular turtle) back in my own school days. Programming is a great way to develop analytical problem-solving skills.
I wonder if there is a free/open-source robotics platform that could interface with DIY robot parts from an electronics store, as an alternative to Lego Mindstorms.