Re: [school-discuss] Scratch Programming Language

[Joel Kahn <jj2kk4@xxxxxxxxx>]

Roberto asked:

>Which is the age of people addressed by scratch?

On the page . . .

http://scratch.mit.edu/pages/educators

. . . there is this:

"It is intended especially for 8- to 16-year-olds,
but younger children can work on Scratch projects
with their parents or older siblings, and college
students use Scratch in some introductory computer
science classes."

Personally, based on the experience I had running a computer lab used
by five- to eight-year-olds, I believe that even some of the really
little kids could get some kind of handle on it with a reasonable
amount of practice; there are wide varieties of talents and aptitudes
at very young ages. I wish that I had had a chance to try it out back
when I still had that lab job. :-(

One more thing should be noted: on the Scratch download page . . .

http://scratch.mit.edu/pages/download

. . . they provide the letdown for hard-core FOSS people:

"We are working on a Linux version, and hope to have it ready by the
end of 2007."

Too bad. The Windows version has been running great on my XP Pro box,
with very few, if any, bugs.

Joel


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