I have loved how Scratch has motivated my child to learn and explore programming. After several years of using it and running into the limitations of browser based Flash, I would encourage him to move on to something more advanced. He would learn the basics of other languages, but he kept going back to Scratch, because it was familiar and easy to accomplish the task he wanted to do.
Last night, we were discussing concurrent access to databases (related to Minecraft server plugins) and I was about to explain race conditions, but instead he described the issue to me. I asked where he learned so much. It turns out that he had first hand experience with them using Scratch and cloud variables. By logging into a project using multiple browsers, he quickly learned how concurrent access could corrupt the data.
I am impressed and appreciate the programming foundation that Scratch has provided to my 13 year old.
Authored Comments
I have loved how Scratch has motivated my child to learn and explore programming. After several years of using it and running into the limitations of browser based Flash, I would encourage him to move on to something more advanced. He would learn the basics of other languages, but he kept going back to Scratch, because it was familiar and easy to accomplish the task he wanted to do.
Last night, we were discussing concurrent access to databases (related to Minecraft server plugins) and I was about to explain race conditions, but instead he described the issue to me. I asked where he learned so much. It turns out that he had first hand experience with them using Scratch and cloud variables. By logging into a project using multiple browsers, he quickly learned how concurrent access could corrupt the data.
I am impressed and appreciate the programming foundation that Scratch has provided to my 13 year old.