Today we started Scratch. Scratch is an open source software designed for teaching kids programing using visual objects. It was developed at MIT for this purpose.
For the most part all that was accomplished today was introducing the kids to the concept of programming a computer to make it do things and drawing pictures to have something that could be seen doing something. We spent half the class working on sprite creation and the tools used to modify them. The rest of class we worked on movement of sprites to show the computer doing something that they told it to do.
These concepts are very abstract for the kids and already looks like it will be difficult to convey to them. It is also a very precise software unlike SketchUp. In Sketchup you can make a house that is 1000 miles tall and 2000 miles long and as long as you keep proper aspect ratios it looks just about the same. In Scratch you must do things in the right order and a lot of thinking goes into every step.
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