Scratch – Educational Programming from MIT

I have had a vague plan that someday I might teach my kids to program. Originally I planned to use a Logo dialect but Sean recently sent me a link to Scratch, the new programming environment for teaching children how to program. Its a graphic interface that runs on Macs and Windows is highly interactive and piggybacks on the turtle graphics model of Logo. However scratch is a much richer and more interactive environment with sounds, animation and a graphical programming language that insulates you completely from the VI/Emacs wars so prevalent in other programming communities 🙂

I’ve only had a quick play with it tonight but so far, so good.

Of course sooner or later, they will have to graduate to Python (the one true programming language).