Sometime back I posted about the beginner’s language Scratch, in the post Scratch the Surface. A 10-year old Jess Page in Invercargill has written his first book “Starting from Scratch”. Good on you Jess Page, it is awesome and we need more of your kind to lead your peers. Read more of the story in the Stuff NZ article.

Also, good on Stuff NZ for publishing the story, however it would have been more useful if it had introduced Scratch in a much better way than a one liner in the end, an some snippets in between. I am sure some keen folks will try to figure out what is Scratch and it may win some kids’ heart over Minecraft (don’t get me started!).

You can try your hands on the visual language at https://scratch.mit.edu. I am sure your kids will enjoy it and work around it better than sending a furious bird over a predefined trajectory.

Here is an introductory video:

Scratch Overview from ScratchEd on Vimeo.

Video created by Michelle Chung and Karen Brennan of the ScratchEd team at Harvard University.
Visit ScratchEd at http://scratched.gse.harvard.edu and try Scratch at http://scratch.mit.edu

Music: “And It Spread” by The Avett Brothers