Scratch - A Game Programming Language For Children

[tinjaw]

I'm at work and will try to write more, unless somebody else want to fill in more of the details.

from http://scratch.mit.edu/about

Scratch is a new programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art -- and share your creations on the web.

Scratch is designed to help young people (ages 8 and up) develop 21st century learning skills. As they create Scratch projects, young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also gaining a deeper understanding of the process of design.

[cthorpe]

Wow... there is a lot to this program.  Could overwhelm a kid.




Here is a little animation I made: http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/cthorpe/3646

You have to have Java ( ) installed to see the animations online .  There doesn't seem to be a way to save the animation/game/whatever into another format on your local machine or upload it anywhere but the scratch page.  It would be really cool if it could create flash swfs.

Carl

[mouser]

cthorpe!

ahahahahahahahah i love it!!! it was worth the wait for the punchline!

[cthorpe]

ahahahahahahahah i love it!!! it was worth the wait for the punchline!

Now let's not go overboard.

[steeladept]

That is still one crazy bird.

[kartal]

I was playing around with this, quite neat actually.

[f0dder]

That cody animation was... trippy. Made about as much sense as modern art

[phitsc]

And now there's ScratchJr, for children aged 5-7. Currently runs on the iPad. An Android version is in the making though.

[p3lb0x]

Oh man, scratch! I remember using that in high school for a multimedia class thing. It's actually a lot more powerful (albeit pretty slow) than you'd think at first.

We made this sort of hybrid puzzle/adventure/platform game:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOSW9HJjYoc

Some of it works really badly (Of course not the parts I was responsible for!), but overall I think it's pretty interesting how much we got out of it considering only one of us had any kind of coding experiences

Small platformer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6bhb9sLqvY

I put this together using the experiences I got from the first thing in about 30-40 minutes. So you can also have decently fast paced games.