Comment by nrjames

2 days ago

As a parent with two kids that used Scratch during 2020 or so… be cautious. The web community was an unregulated social network with follows, likes, comments, and a wide age range (apparently) of people interacting. Around that time, there was a lot of inappropriate content, some bullying, sketches about self-harm, sex, etc. Perhaps they’ve fixed the issue. If not, I would try to install it locally and keep them away from the official website.

Incidentally, I later came to believe that the visual coding impeded their ability to learn text-based coding. That was just my experience and I don’t have formal research to back it up, but I still wonder about it.

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nrjames

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QuaternionsBhop  2 days ago

> visual coding impeded their ability to learn text-based coding

As a former child, my opinion is the opposite. I learned visual programming with Lego Mindstorms NXT in ~2008, and later developed an interest in text programming on Roblox in ~2012. It's my belief that my fluency with concepts like control flow and values output from one part of the program serving as inputs for another part of the program were largely transferable to text-based programming. Learning a first programming language is 30% learning syntax, and 70% learning programming.