“How does a computer understand languages if it’s not a human being?”

I wish I had a recording of my 5-year old nephew asking me that question, after I had quickly explained to him that there are languages that people use to communicate with computers. I had visited Patrick that day to show him Scratch, the “programming language for everyone” from the MIT Media Lab. He’s younger than the target demographic, which is 8 and above, but I was curious to see what he’d say as we looked at it together.

It was clear from the outset that I had underestimated his agility with user interfaces and ability to learn new concepts.  He proceeded to set up a football stadium background with several football player “sprites”. I asked him if he wanted to get rid of the default Scratch cartoon cat sprite which looked out of place on the football field, but he gave me one stern look and made sure that I no longer had access to the mouse: “That’s the coach, Megan.”  I told him in my best how-to-talk-to-a-kindergartner voice that he could program the players to move around, and before I could finish the sentence he jumped in to help: “You mean animate them?”

When I was Patrick’s age, my older brother and I had a Commodore VIC-20. I can’t recall where it came from — as far as I know it was just there one day and we loved it. Watching Patrick fiddle with Scratch, figuring out by himself how to draw a football with the mouse after a brief trial-and-error period with the buttons on the main screen, I was reminded of my approach to the VIC-20 back then.  We had a manual with Commodore BASIC commands, and some games, and would spend hours tinkering away; no goals, no schedules, just playing.  It’s exciting to think about the learning environment that open-minded, technically nimble children and their teachers can create together with a tool like Scratch, especially since the teachers will have to continuously learn from their students in order to keep up.

I encourage anyone who is interested in Scratch to visit MIT’s site (http://scratch.mit.edu/) to view tutorials and example projects, and of course to download and start exploring it.  After my own cursory look at Scratch, I plan to check out the community of developers and educators via the active forums, write a program or two myself, and basically arrive much better prepared for my next lesson with Patrick — or more accurately his next lesson with me.