In praise of - Scratch

Both of my children are in Primary School and they are now learning "coding" using the fantastic Scratch website. I remember reading about this in the news a few months ago, but now I am helping them with their homework I cannot speak highly enough about this initiative.

As a youngster myself I remember playing around with a BBC Microcomputer.

10 CLS
20 PRINT "STEPHEN IS COOL"
30 GOTO 20

At university I remember doing a bit of C, FORTRAN and VBA to help analyse results of lab work. This then took me into my day-job which is creating software and websites for the construction industry.

Anyway, back to Scratch, it allows you to build fun visual computer games using "building blocks" of code. It reduces the typing needed as you can get started by just sticking blocks of code together and seeing what happens.

Once you get used to it - fun games to try and write (especially if you are working with kids) are:

1. Pub quiz games - Click on the correct answer - import some nice images - keep score - give the result at the end
2. Platform game - Control the Sprite with the cursors and make fences and clouds and food fly past to produce a "Mario" style platform game
3. Shooting game - Make targets appear and shoot them to make them disappear, add the points up as you go along.

Some screenshots from a recent piece of homework that came through the Hamil House are below. Really simple, but needed designed (sourcing images, resizing them, working out the flow of logic), developed (sticking the code blocks together) and then tested (does it work?). All great fun learning activities for kids. The homework was to do a fun quiz about a European country...

Images appear and disappear when clicked on

In the background the score is being remembered

Different end-screens are shown depending on your success

Events, sensing, appearance and commenting in the simple to use code

Finally, the whole web community is embraced as you can share projects with your friends and explore other people's code so you can keep getting better. Top stuff!

Further info:

• The Scratch website - http://scratch.mit.edu
• The Scratch Wikipedia page - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scratch_%28programming_language%29