[TriZPUG] Blocky vs Scratch

[Chris Calloway]

On 9/4/2014 10:44 PM, Mark Hutchinson wrote:
> I think the Blocky site is more difficult because it poses actual
> problems to be solved, rather than providing a free-form play
> environment like Scratch.

Agree. I've gotten to observe three Young Coders events now. Some of you 
have more experience because you've actually led Young Coders events 
whereas I've only watched. But at each of the events I observed, the 
kids did not stick to the program. Once they found something they could 
manipulate without further instruction, they were off to the races. The 
instructors had a hard time keeping up. Directing kids' attentions down 
a particular path is a pretty tough thing to do.

I think you have to wait for kids to come back to you and ask why 
something didn't work or how do they do something they haven't learned 
yet. And it has to be something they come up with, not the thing you 
want them to learn. Unless it's a mutual play situation where you share 
a thing you created alongside and they are then wowed and want to know 
how they can do it.

Frequent sharing may be a win if it's not the kind of sharing where one 
kid is so outstanding that it makes the others feel inadequate. Blockly 
does a nod to the sharing thing by allowing you to export the output of 
a program you made to Reddit (although if I had kids I wouldn't let them 
anywhere near Reddit).

-- 
Sincerely,

Chris Calloway, Applications Analyst
UNC Renaissance Computing Institute
100 Europa Drive, Suite 540, Chapel Hill, NC 27517
(919) 599-3530