Skip to content
Ray On Storage Blog

Ray On Storage Blog

Storage, Strategy & Systems

  • Home
  • About
    • Contact
    • Subscribe to Blog
  • Silverton Consulting (SCI) Home
    • SCI Storage Dispatches
    • SCI Analyst Research
  • GreyBeards On Storage Podcasts
Posted on June 12, 2017 by Ray

Ten years of Scratch and still counting

Ten years ago last month, Scratch, an MIT Media Lab project, was released to the public. If you don’t know, Scratch is a coding language for children to learn how to code. Scratch is for kids aged 8-16 and it’s available for download (Mac download here, uses Adobe Air).

What’s it like?

In 2007, my two kids were 5 and 7 years old and we started playing with Scratch. After you install Scratch, you can execute it and it brings up a Scratch coding environment.

There you have a number of built in coding constructs which you can use to code your project. You use this code on sprites or objects. I would use the paint tool to create objects (costumes) of my own design (space ships, planes, cars, etc.). Once you have these sprites painted, you can then animate them using the Scratch code scripts. You can have any number of sprites. You can even take a picture with the computer’s camera and call that a sprite. You can also record sounds with the computer’s microphone and use the sounds to help animate the sprite.

The coding language is very Google Blockly like with graphical or visual depictions of loop and control statements, more of a visual programming language than your standard coding.

Scratch’s originally based off the Logo project, an early object oriented language designed to help kids learn to code. The art objects or sprites you create with Scratch are effectively objects which you invoke Scratch methods on. There’s even a ScratchJR for kids aged 5-7.

Coding Scratch

One of the methods we used was to follow another object. We would create one plane and then copy it to create others. Then we would have these “children” planes each follow the parent plane, creating a squadron. We could direct the flight path of the parent plane using key strokes or mouse actions. The squadron would then fly together around the play space.

We could have the squadron or any specific plane shoot projectiles at other planes or sprites. We would then have two squadrons flying around shooting at one another. This took just a few methods to get  up and running. Another technique was to paint a background of clouds (called a stage) and have this stage be scrolling by in the background of your other objects.

The language lends itself to experiential programming. Where you just try something out and if it didn’t work, try something else.

It was cool and fun tool and showed that coding needn’t be relegated to software engineers and could be done by anyone.

I tried Logo coding before Scratch. It uses a Turtle as a cursor that you animate to move around a work space. The Turtle could leave different color trails to paint geometric patterns on the work space.

Logo was fun to show mathematical concepts such as geometrical construction but was not nearly as flexible as Scratch. I suppose Logo was simpler to code to generate geometrical patterns.

Scratch’s online community

At the time we started playing with Scratch, the online community was only just starting up but nowadays there’s 22 million shared Scratch projects, available to be downloaded for an online user, with 30K new ones  created every day.  There are currently 18 million members of the Scratch online community.

Every May there’s Scratch day events to meet others in the community in person, share, tell and receive feedback on projects and celebrate the creation of Scratch.

What’s new with Scratch

These days, with Scratch 2.0, you can create Scratch projects directly in a web browser window (with Flash).

Theres also a Scratch Foundation that funds the ongoing development of Scratch. The next version, 3.0 is being released next year and is intended to make it easier to create Scratch projects on mobile devices and tablets.

They are also targeting 3.0 to use outside interfaces, like Lego construction kits. It would be nice to see more of this.

All in all it’s a fun tool to use.

I tried to get v2.0 working on my Mac laptop today (running 10.11.6) but it says Adobe Air is not installed after I have installed Air twice?! I did however manage to download v1.4 and get it working. It’s not like I remember it from before but looks better.

 

Related

CategoriesCrowdsourcing, desktop virtualization, Strategic Inflection Points, Strategy, Visionary leadershp Tagsanimating objects, Kids coding, Logo, MIT Media Lab, Scratch

Post navigation

Previous PostPrevious Google releases new Cloud TPU & Machine Learning supercomputer in the cloud
Next PostNext Axellio, next gen, IO intensive server for RT analytics by X-IO Technologies

Subscribe to our Storage Intelligence Newsletter Now

Sign up for our free e-newsletter that reports on storage performance & major storage announcements each month.

News and Events

- See our recently posted SPEC sfs2014 performance report and VMware's new vSAN and preview of vSAN beta at VMworld USA
- See our recently updated (January 2019) SAN-NAS Buying Guide with our latest performance & product information.
- Hear the GreyBeard's talk AI infrastructure with Frederic Van Haren, CTO&Founder, HighFens.

Calendar:
- February 26-March 1, SFD, San Jose, CA

TwitterCounter for @RayLucchesi

Top Posts & Pages

  • Two dimensional magnetic recording (TDMR)
  • New GraphCore GC2 chips with 2PFlop performance in a Dell Server
  • Storage throughput vs. IO response time and why it matters
  • Disaster recovery from VMware to AWS using Dell EMC Avamar & Data Domain
  • Oracle RMAN and data deduplication - part 2

Recent Posts

  • IT in space
  • Decoding deep learning
  • Scratch 3.0 is out
  • Learning machine learning – part 3
  • Learning Machine Learning – part 2

Recent Tweets

  • Erich Bloch, Who Helped Develop IBM Mainframe, Dies at 91 nyti.ms/2gLHxEa also developed core memory and worked on Stretch… 2 years ago
  • Woa, I think I detected a major change in (computing) force, #HPE shows prototype of in memory computing sys hpe.com/us/en/newsroom… 2 years ago
  • RT @alexgalbraith: ICYMI: AWS Certified Developer Associate (CDA) Exam Experience & Tips buff.ly/2gDp1Tm buff.ly/1DZjjuV AWS, Cloud, Amazon,… 2 years ago
  • Forget Filling Ad Breaks; Some Marketers Make the Podcasts, a fictional multipart GBoS series?@DeepStorageNet nytimes.com/2016/11/21/bus… 2 years ago
  • How Apple Empowers, and Employs, the American Working Class, via @nytimes apples big move into Austin TX nytimes.com/2016/11/21/tec… 2 years ago

Follow Me on Twitter

Powered by Twitter Tools

Tag Cloud

  • Amazon S3
  • Apple
  • Backup
  • Big data
  • Chart of the month
  • CIFS
  • Cloud computing
  • Cloud Storage
  • Commodity hardware
  • Data Domain
  • Data encryption
  • Data security
  • Deduplication
  • EMC
  • EMCWorld
  • ESRP
  • Exchange performance
  • Exchange Solution Reviewed Program
  • Hadoop
  • HDS
  • HP
  • IBM
  • IBM Research
  • Intel
  • IOPS
  • iPad
  • iSCSI
  • LTO
  • Microsoft Exchange
  • MLC NAND
  • NAND
  • NetApp
  • NFS
  • Seagate
  • SNIA
  • SNW
  • snwusa
  • solid state drives
  • SPC-1
  • SPECsfs2008
  • SSD
  • SSD performance
  • SSD reliability
  • Storage Performance Council
  • VMware

Categories

Archives

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 5,372 other subscribers

BTW, the RayOnStorage blog doesn't advertise. But blogging like this takes time and time is money. If you or anyone else is interested in helping fund this blog, Please consider sending some BTC our way, any amount would help, even 0.0001BTC. Our BTC wallet address is: 1MqBbAvMo6QbCVD6ZwtbLaPxmcUZGj9Ghw
(c) 2005-2018 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved
Proudly powered by WordPress