Getting Started with Scratch - A Programmer's Guide

I Programmer - A Programmer's Guide to Scratch

"Scratch is one of a number of computer languages aimed at getting people, mostly but far from exclusively children, started with programming. If you haven't come across it before, see Scratch not to be sniffed at! for its background.

The idea is to expose the student to the concepts of programming without bothering them with the tedious things like typing, spelling and exact syntax. There is also an argument that the approach used by systems like Scratch is so good that it raises the question why we don't use it for real development? This really is a good question and not one I have an answer to.

Even if you don't think that you are going to use Scratch to teach programming you really need to know something about its approach to programming - it might be the way we all do it in the future.

So Scratch is an easy to learn easy to use language.

Why then do we need an introduction to it?

The answer is that, of all the people who encounter Scratch, programmers are often the most mystified. They expect to sit down and use it without spending any time on learning about it. After all if you can program in X, where X stands for whatever language you already know, then Scratch should be easy.

The fact of the matter is that programmers often learn their skill by doing, and don't often spend hours thinking deep thoughts about what is fundamentally behind what they do. As a result a skilled programmer might well find Scratch to be confusing and not at all about programming.

With these thoughts in mind let's take a programmer's look at Scratch.

This is not an introduction that is designed to be useful to a complete beginner, but an introduction that might enable a programmer to introduce a complete beginner to the art, craft and science of programming. It really is a whole new way of thinking.

Getting started

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Until I blogged about it on the Kinect Gallery, Kinect 2 Scratch, I hadn't heard much about Scratch. Since then I've started to keep my eyes open for articles on it and this guide seems to provide a good introduction to it.

 

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Kinect 2 Scratch