

How my son and I kind of became game programmers - Graham24
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/mar/12/how-my-son-and-i-became-game-programmers-scatch

======
davidgerard
The UK government has said all children will learn coding in school. What this
actually means is shoving them in front of Scratch. My 7yo daughter and her
friends - MLP-loving girly girls in pink dresses - are _really into this_ and
spending lots of time and attention on it. I find it hard to overstate how
strongly I approve of this.

~~~
jimmaswell
When I went to high school, there was a choice to go to this offshoot location
for half the day, which had a programming class option. I went to that and it
was what you'd expect out of a high school level programming class, I guess.
Maybe a bit worse since in C++ and VB.NET it didn't really go into any
abstract theory or even get to classes and functions. Except apparently now
they've started using Scratch instead of real languages in it. I have to
wonder if that's inappropriately dumbed down for that grade level. Someone
should be able to handle real programming languages at that age if they're
making a serious attempt to learn the field.

~~~
bjwbell
Scratch is a real programming language! Programming isn't about how fancy the
tools you use are. It's about what you do with the tools you have. I started
out in nothing more than QBasic.

~~~
evincarofautumn
QBasic was the Scratch of a certain era. The 0-to-pixels was small, the
development environment offered useful help only a click away, and you could
easily integrate it with external libraries if you wanted more advanced
features or better performance.

------
itschaffey
I'm glad the UK government have ensured that every child will be learning to
code - I wish they had the foresight to implement it 10 years ago. What
concerns me is the people teaching the children to code - surely tapping into
local community networks and reaching out to people who have been developing
for years will allow the children to explore more exciting tech. Learning to
code with Scratch is a great start - I'm just worried about the support
networks in place to developer these young coders. Of course, the super
motivated students will developer their skills outside of the classroom - I
hope schools support those students who perhaps aren't as keen to code when
they first start as well.

------
aguywithamum
Does anyone have experience with other things like Scratch? I remember using a
program, which looks a lot like Scratch (but isn't), at a technical summer
camp when I was younger that let one make simple games with Scratch-like
rules, but I can't remember what it was called.

