Why teaching Scratch should be scratched

Why are we teaching our kids Scratch
Scratch is one of the simplest ways for us to introduce programming to the younger generation that is also fun and engaging. The process is, throw a few blocks on the screen and click run and voila, you have visual feedback.

I have also seen a lot of adults who try to jump into coding and immediately want to jump into GUI development because they want to see reward from their code. This is a very bad approach and we will look at this in a future article.

Scratch has many benefits and here they are:

1. Scratch allows for young people to integrate creativity in storytelling, games, and animation.
   Younger kids can collaborate on projects through the use of Scratch, and share their projects online.

2. Scratch allows students to develop 21st century skills through the use of technology.

3. Scratch can be used by people of all ages making it easy and simple for younger people to pick it up.

4. Scratch can be used across curricula and students and teachers can create and share resources via scratch.

Why Scratch should be scratched
My first major gripe with Scratch is that it conditions younger people to think they are cut out to think they are cut out to be programmers. We teach them that computer programming is all about dragging a few blocks around and getting visual feedback. Then they spend 3 hours downloading an IDE and the first and last thing they see is this:

#include<iostream>  

using namespace std; 

int main() 
{ 
    // prints hello world 
    cout<<"Hello World"; 

    return 0; 
} 

This is just Hello World in C++. There are no blocks, and once you run the lines all you get is a black screen with Hello World. Then they try to follow a tutorial for creating a simple Website and they have to design it in HTML, CSS, dive into a little bit of Javascript (https://dev.to/zimspy007/why-we-love-to-hate-javascript-nfd
) too and you will quit coding for life.

The big mistake most of the people who wish to teach computers to their children drop into a programming class that will teach them Scratch combined with robotics. There is a lot more to computers than just teaching programming. There are a whole lot of better ways to teach the young about computers and here is a nice road-map.

1. Teach computer care
2. Teach them using input devices and interacting with items on the screen
3. Teach them how to type
4. Teach them how to open a web browser and find stuff on the Interweb (have a firewall in place to block terrible websites)

This alone will give you months of learning material and by the time you are done with these 4 lessons your child will have a basic understanding of computers.