January 22, 2024

Teaching Scratch to kids

Hello,

Hope your 2024 is getting off to a good start!

I just published a new blog post:

Last Monday, I found myself standing in front of eight kids, trying to explain what a y-coordinate is.

“Um, it’s kinda like a street address…?”

How did I end up there? Well, my kids go to a Montessori school, and one of the traditions at the school is afternoon projects run by parents. These cover all kinds of different subjects: yoga, gardening, climbing, chess, etc. And I volunteered to run a project about programming — one 90-minute session per week for five weeks.

You can read the full post here: Thoughts on Scratch.

Some other things worth sharing:

• I asked about resources for teaching programming to kids and got some super helpful replies.
• Curriculum Design as an Engineering Problem: Lessons from the Field (2018) by Shriram Krishnamurthi.
• I really enjoyed @ryanjfleury's series of articles on immediate-mode UI. It gave me a much better understanding of the design space for immediate-mode GUIs and how to handle some more complex cases.
• Casey Muratori's Immediate-Mode Graphical User Interfaces is also a good introduction to the topic.

Take care,

Pat