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Lorna and her classmates, who range in age from 4 to 7, are taking part in a pilot study here at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, to see how young children respond to ScratchJr, a spin-off of the Scratch programming language. Scratch was invented to teach students as young as 8 how to program using graphical blocks instead of text. Now even children who haven't yet learned to read or write are getting in on the act.
Tools like Scratch aim to address what their developers see as a lack of computer programming instruction in schools today. The general thinking is that children are growing up surrounded by powerful machines they do not understand and teaching needs to be overhauled to prepare today's youth for a future living and working closely with computers.
Unlike typical programming languages, which require users to type in complicated text commands, Scratch uses coloured blocks that are strung together to create lines of code. ScratchJr is similar, only the commands are even simpler. After assembling a rudimentary program, the child clicks a green flag at the beginning of the list of commands to run it.
It may sound very simple, says Marina Bers at Tufts, who co-created ScratchJr, "but it teaches sequencing – the idea that order matters".
Concepts become more complex as the child progresses. On just their third day with ScratchJr, the youngsters are being introduced to the idea of programming tasks in parallel – in this case, making a snake wriggle across a grassy meadow while a bird glides down from the air. This involves two separate strings of commands, one governing the bird and the other the snake, and they must be made to work simultaneously.
h/t Hacker News
