Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Scratch for Early Elementary Students

Scratch is a graphical IDE that lets children build programs by moving blocks around a screen.  I've been having a good experience with a first grade girl.  Scratch does require children to be able to read English words.  The system makes it easy to control graphics, sound, and keyboard input.  There's a fairly good subset of the features that my 7th grade student is getting with Pygame.  I've got it running both on Mac and Linux.  Scratch also works on Windows.  The biggest problem I've had so far is actually getting the student to manipulate, drag and drop, the icons from the toolbox into the main pane.  She's been using a trackpad on the teaching system and it's difficult right now for her to control it.  

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