Developing the next generation

[RokCoder]

So, I have a nearly 7 year old daughter and she seems interested in daddy pounding on the keyboard when I am programming. I know scratch is a language for kids as well. Anyone have experince of it and can point me in a direction to have enough resources to teach it? Or should I just download it and it is all in the langauge already? Thanks!

Scratch is great for kids as it removes the hurdles to getting results from their coding. They learn all the principles and underlying logic required for coding without having to jump through hoops to get immediate results. You don't need to download anything at all - just hop over to the Scratch website, set your daughter up with an account and start coding. There's also a wonderful community feel to the site with excellent moderation making it a safe space for children to be.

So, I have a nearly 7 year old daughter and she seems interested in daddy pounding on the keyboard when I am programming. I know scratch is a language for kids as well. Anyone have experince of it and can point me in a direction to have enough resources to teach it? Or should I just download it and it is all in the langauge already? Thanks!

Our own @RokCoder (Cliff Davies) has a scratch site you may be interested in:

https://rokcoder.com/scratch/index.html

He has done amazing things using Scratch. Your daughter may like playing a few of his games and seeing what can be done in the language.

He has tutorials too:

https://scratch.mit.edu/users/RokCoderTutorials/

Thanks Terry. I learned Scratch as my children had expressed an interest in it and I wanted to be able to support them - very much like the situation you're in by the sounds of it. My children went on to set up a lunchtime Scratch club in their school and, similarly, I set up various coding clubs at libraries and schools in the area. It's incredibly fun to use and you can get far better results from it than would initially be expected. Many of my projects are done as examples to show children what Scratch is capable of. The others, simply because they were challenging and fun to make!

Trying to check this out:

https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/728370791/

requires me to have an account.

You need an account if you want to play multiplayer games but should be able to play fine against the AI. The reason for this is that "cloud variables" are only available to Scratchers who have accounts and have lost the "New Scratcher" status. The logic behind this is to prevent overuse and spamming of the cloud variable system. I doubt very much cloud variables were put in place for anything more than allowing simple high score leaderboards and such - basically a project can add up to ten cloud variables whose values can be read and written from any instance of the project. Using jiggery-pokery you can set a basic system up to allow these variables to relay enough data to make multiplayer games feasible. Again, the challenge is appealing!