Scratch to Smalltalk

The journalist Virginia Heffernan wrote a wired article titled Stemtrails:

The contemporary STEM curricula in lower schools seem, in fact, to have very little as a through line, unless you count the popular Scratch app, a production of the Siegel Family Endowment, which is heavily subsidized by Google and the Cartoon Network. The app lets kids learn loops and if-then blocks in a kind of baby programming language that no adult uses. It's fun.

When reading the phrase "real languages", my first reaction was: We don't send kids down into salt mines either. If kids are using the same languages that are used in production today, should it surprise anyone that they don't have any new ideas?

For several years, I have been using Pier for years, but the Pillar project never seemed like anything more than an academic tool - it specializes in generating Latex for publishing in journals. After thinking on Virginia's quote I realized I had fallen into the same trap and ignored Pillar documentation. One benefit that I immediately gained after opening it was that I could use annotations instead of HTML for creating the above quote.

Several years ago, I wrote about principles learned using the EToy's Painting Tool, however there could be more done to move Scratchers to Smalltalk programmers where more principles could be discovered.

Posted by John Borden at 24 February 2020, 2:11 pm link