I just spent today spending my time (I’m feeling redundant) with an interesting little app, Scratch. It’s a cool little application that introduces children and early teens to programming and animation.

Normally, I haven’t ever realy gotten the point of programming languages for children. I remember trying out SiMPLE to see how it compared to Python, and I wasn’t impressed. Scratch is actually pretty interesting and I would recommend it as an application to install on the computers of any young relatives you have. It’s available for Windows (appears to work on Vista), Mac, and Linux (via an unofficial installer).

Now, what are the advantages of using Scratch over some language like Python or Javascript? And is Scratch a powerful programming tool?

Well, Scratch is centered around building animations and games quickly. Plenty of children would have an easy and fun time creating games in Scratch. Doing similar things in Python or Javascript take more difficulty.

So, what does Scratch look like? A screenshot is below. Click on it to view it full screen.

Scratch has a graphical display of the code, but contains many control structures that will be familiar to programmers. Some examples are if/else, for (or rather some weaker constructs that do things that for is capable of), and exit.

Of course, many other programming languages have that and more, but the great thing about Scratch is that it has all this and is easy. Anybody can pick it up and start using it.

So, if you have access to kids, admin access to the kids’ computers, and the Internet on those computers.