Inner city urban youth might not be the first thing people think of when they think programmers, although they would be very wrong. The Computer Clubhouse in LA provides a place for inner city youth to play around with different technologies. Entertainment can range from playing Xbox to utilizing a recording studio. The Clubhouse decided to bring on an object oriented programming software named Scratch to see if they could get the youth interested in programming. They did.
Figure 1: Code 'Blocks' from Scratch
(taken from article referenced below)
So what is scratch? Scratch is an object oriented programming software create by The Brainiacs over at MIT to elicit youth interest into programming and then make the learning process easy and fun. Users of the program create a Sprite, an instantiation of a class, and then through stacking 'blocks' which represent lines of code, create sequences that can have the Sprite perform a multitude of fun activities.
The program was ran in the Clubhouse for 18 months. So what did the students learn? Well, first it should be pointed out that they were having so much fun that they weren't even considering it programming. Now what they brought away from the experience was the understanding of some difficult concepts in programming such as Boolean logic, sequential control flow, loops, conditional statements, variables, and random numbers.
I think this is a great program for youth and I am happy to hear of this success story. The best way to teach a student is to make them think they are not in school. By this I am referring to traditional 'boring' school. You need to make learning fun and that is what was done with this program. I would even consider small programming exercises for possible extra credit in one of my math classes.
References:
John, Maloney, Peppler Kylie, Kafai Yasmin, Resnick Michel, and Rusk Natalie. "Programming by Choice: Urban Youth Learning Programming with Scratch." Print.
