rivet VS scratch-www

But now coming to today's tool, let's talk about a topic that comes and goes, but it's always fun to play around with. I'm referring to AI; as you know, I'm not an AI-addicted person, but I like to have my share of fun with it! And a few days ago I came across the program that I am presenting to you today which aims to be very interesting and fun! Rivet, this is the name of the tool of this week, is a visual development environment for AI agents. But in what sense? Well, once you download the software, you will have a drag and drop interface to create a flow of information that can interact with various LLMs, whether it's GPT, Google models, or even Open models like Ollama running locally. It can handle all the classic control flows (if, loop etc.) and can integrate JS functions directly into it or import them from the project where we decide to incorporate it.

https://rivet.ironcladapp.com

LiveCode is about the closest literal logical successor to HyperCard.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveCode?wprov=sfti1

That said, I think Scratch is a better learning environment these days and you can develop workable apps in the style of HyperCard. There are plenty of tutorials, documentation, and examples to work from.

https://scratch.mit.edu

and https://codecombat.com, which has been around for a while now.

I think this paradigm (navigating a character using "move" function invocations) is good but kind of exhausts its usefulness after a while. I question whether my daughter learns coding this way or just is playing a turn based top down platformer. The most code like thing is when you use 'loops' to have characters repeat sequences of moves. I think when kids grok these things these apps become just types of glofiried education flavoured video games. There are a lot of things in kodable for instance that I feel are just basic web games with coding terms slapped on it.

https://scratch.mit.edu/ is more like 'programming' imo, even at the level of the objective -- having a blank canvas to create something. It seems a little advanced for my kids right now though.

+1 Scratch! My son started with it, then expanded into Roblox/Lua.

Children can download other people's games and experiment there. Scratch also has pre-made art, sounds, music.

https://scratch.mit.edu/

Scratch.mit.edu is a highly-recommended place to start [1] https://scratch.mit.edu/

> Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children and a coding language with a simple visual interface that allows young people to create digital stories, games, and animations. Scratch is designed, developed, and moderated by the Scratch Foundation, a nonprofit organization. [2]

1: https://scratch.mit.edu/

https://scratch.mit.edu/ (Scratch version 2)

Someone who uses scratch.mit.edu (like me)

Now that I think of it, I did start game development on scratch before going right into java (because of minecraft).