Nervetree

I was at a Chris and Lisas’ house last night. Their son (10) showed me some video games he had just created using a really innovative smalltalk IDE for children. It’s called “scratch” http://scratch.mit.edu. The various controll structures in programming are shaped like lego/ puzzle pieces. Certain actions only fit with in certain data structures. But piecing them together you can easily make and learn programming. I think this really really would have ‘fit my head’ when I was young. After watching him for about 20 minutes, I could easily see him writing much more difficult things in only a few years.

The IDE generates smalltalk squeak in the background, creating objects, actions, amimations, images and passing messages around between objects. There’s even a smalltalk debugger, but it’s hidden enough that you really really have to want to get at it. I assume this is to prevent people from accidenly going there and getting confused.

You make the datastructures, then associate them with images or animation. Their son made a pretty respectable game in 2 days. When done, you can share it on the scratch site, people can play it, download the code and extend it themselves. They call this ‘remixing’. Its a really cool way of getting kids into open source programming.