I am fully willing to admit coding Choose Your Own Adventure books in BASIC is not as appealing to most kids as it was to me. So leave it to the folks at MIT to come up with Scratch - a simple IDE designed to teach programming concepts without all the messy stuff like syntax. Last night I downloaded Scratch and let Hannah and Rachel both try it out.
I initially guided them to build a few simple animations, then left them to do whatever they wanted (each having their own computer). Hannah tended to stay in the paint portion building artwork like below:
Rachel was focused on making mini scripts to animate objects, and playing with the graphic effects. This ended when she saw Hannah's trippy backgrounds and then spent the rest of the night learning how Hannah made them. They are both just getting started, but I'm sure soon I'll have more of their work to post.
Scratch has setup an area to share projects with the community. This at the moment seems to be filled with projects created by older geeks like me, but I can see this catching on quickly with the MySpace crowd (except MySpace currently won't allow you to embed a Java applet). Since it's important I know how Scratch works to um... answer questions, I'll share with you my first Scratch game.
[deleted applet - tired of Java killing browser]Learn more about this project
