Animation and Robotics

Scratch makes it easy to program your own interactive stories, games, and animations — and share your creations on the web. As you create and share projects with Scratch, you learn to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively. Scratch is a project of the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab. It is available for free download from http://scratch.mit.edu

That is what MIT wants me to tell you about Scratch.  What I want to say is that I think Scratch is the best way to teach anyone how to start programming.  Please don’t just take my word for it, take a look at Harvard’s introduction to computer science class where they use Scratch to get their students off to a good start. If its good enough for Harvard, well, maybe its good enough for my third grader…http://academicearth.org/lectures/introduction-to-programming-and-scratch  Mostly, I think its simple enough to learn very easily, and powerful enough to be a super fun tool. 

One last point.  Scratch can appear like a simple, fun tool, but it can also be used to teach important concepts that are used across all programming languages.  Scratch teaches what loops are, how variables, boolean equations, and algorythms work.  They allow major concepts to be understood without punishing students for the minor syntax errors which plague students when learning more complex languages like C.  Of course, Scratch is not the only language developed to help with learning programming.  See my post on