First of all, I think it’s great that they’re creating something like Scratch, a programming language for children. As someone in his early 20’s who avidly uses technology on a daily basis, learning some form of programming for business purposes or personal purposes (read: creating mod’s for games/assisting a friend in the development of a game for Android) has piqued my interest. However, programming is incredibly intimidating, primarily because of the use of logic and seemingly nonsensical systems that govern it. Scratch, being a water’d down version of any other programming language, creates an easy entry point for new comers like me to begin learning the basics of programming. More importantly, however, Scratch is a system that can be easily learned and mastered by children. Thus, where I am completely lost in the whimsical world of programming, today’s children can grow up learning about programming as a part of the every day, enabling them to become the computer wizards of tomorrow at potentially, significantly less effort than I would have to make.

I messed around with it a bit and made a talking cat play Mary Had a Little Lamb. What was amazing was that I could change the tempo and instrument, and even program the cat to do a sort of dance while it played.

For the maze, I did move forward, turn left, move forward, move forward, if wall ahead do turn right, move forward, move forward, turn left, move forward, move forward, turn right, move forward, turn left, move forward.

I thought that the logic language was somewhat limited. for example, it would have been convenient if they had a logic statement that was something like “if at intersection” or something. It just seemed oddly lacking.

Finally, I would like to bring up a very important issue. What relevance does this have to our history course/producing digital works of history? I can think of some solutions to this answer: for example, we may want to produce our own little animations using programs like scratch or we may need to program certain things in the creation of a website, but this has not been explicitly discussed in class.