Scratch-www Alternatives

scratch-www reviews and mentions

• Ask HN: Platform for 11 year old to create video games?
  38 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Sep 2024

  A good place to start with kids that age is Scratch: https://scratch.mit.edu/

• Ask HN: Intro to Game Development path for a 12 year old?
  3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 5 Sep 2024

  I think going straight to Switch would likely be a tall order. I’d start him off with something where he can be successful right away, writing something he can play on his own computer or share with friends easily.

  Scratch[0] is often used to start kids out with programming. He may already use it in school, I know my nephew does, who is around the same age. I made a silly little game in Scratch about a year ago to share with my nephews[1], to try and inspire them a bit. The oldest one quickly went into the code and started tweaking the variables I had set to control things like speed and randomness to make it more chaotic. It’s a good way to learn the concepts of variables, loops, sprites, hit boxes, etc without getting bogged down with the complexity of syntax or a professional game engine. It’s also in the browser, so he can easily share with friends and have them play it, or fork it.

  After that, maybe look to something like Godot[2]. It’s free and open source, so he doesn’t have to worry about licensing and all that nonsense that a 12 year old shouldn’t have to think about. I briefly looked and saw some videos of people running the Godot engine on the Switch, but I don’t know what’s involved in that.

  I wouldn’t get too tied to a console when learning. Rumors of the Switch 2 are floating around, and who knows, that could mean a whole different path. Starting on the computer avoids this problem, and other huddles. Then if he likes the act of game dev and learning those things, he can cross the bridge to whatever the current console is, if that’s the direction he wants to head.

  [0] https://scratch.mit.edu/

  [1] https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/733627274/

  [2] https://godotengine.org/

• Where Should Visual Programming Go?
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Jul 2024

  For anyone interested in working on visual programming professionally, we use it for creation in Rec Room in a system I built called Circuits https://blog.recroom.com/posts/2021/5/03/the-circuits-handbo...

  It has a real place among novice programmers. We even have some experts who use it as a fun alternative to writing text. I don't see visual systems as an effective way to replace everything us experts are doing but they've gotten a ton of mileage in the jr. and learning domain. Scratch (https://scratch.mit.edu/) being another obvious example.

  See the email in my profile if you are interested in roles and I'll see if we can find something that fits.

• Low-code drag-and-drop tool for building RESTful APIs with in minutes.
  11 projects | dev.to | 4 Jul 2024

  After some days, my sister, who was in class 2 then, came to me and showed me the first program she wrote. It was not a code-based program but a visual program using software called Scratch 3.0. It is similar to NODE-RED but with a different approach, focusing more on programming than wiring together hardware devices. It contains all the node blocks needed to build a simple program without any coding knowledge and is very user-friendly for children new to computer programming.

• The Forth Deck mini: a portable Forth computer with a discrete CPU
  6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Jun 2024
• HyperCard Simulator
  6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Jun 2024
• Ask HN: Modern Day Equivalent to HyperCard?
  9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 1 May 2024

  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

• Scratch is the largest free coding community for kids
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 13 Apr 2024
• Screen-free coding for children: the xylophone maze
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 22 Feb 2024

  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.

• Ask HN: Yo wants to build a game, I'm lost. What can I do?
  20 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Jan 2024

  +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/

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