On Sat, Feb 5, 2011 at 9:43 PM, Mark Engelberg <[email protected]>wrote:
> There are projects that are trivial in Scratch that are hard in Racket, and > vice versa. Porting your Scratch projects to Racket is not likely to be a > very productive use of your time because they have such different strengths > and weaknesses. I think your best bet is to pick some projects which are in > Racket's world teachpack's "sweet spot" and work on those with your son. > > Don't worry about trying to "replace" Scratch with Racket. My son is a > fairly sophisticated Racketeer at this point but he still has loads of fun > playing around with Scratch, using it for the things it is especially > well-suited for and deeply enjoying its community aspects. There's nothing > wrong with appreciating both. > I agree in principle, but I think that there are things that _should_ be in Racket's sweet spot, but for some small and fixable issues. The whole big-bang structure is such a great idea, that the few issues that make it harder than it should be to build satisfying video games are really worth fixing. The key thing that I like pedagogically about the big-bang is the way it makes the kid think explicitly about how they're modeling the state of the game. I also think it's worth learning from the places where Scratch is successful. I think the discoverability of the primitives, and the way that the syntax is reflected in the geometry of the blocks is really fantastic. I'd love to see a version of Racket with an optional editor that looks more like Scratch's editor --- I know that this is something that people have talked about, and I think it would be a boon for young'uns who are just starting out, for whom getting the syntax right can be tricky. y
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