I've been spending a lot of time recently playing with two incredible tools provided by MIT. They are Scratch and App Inventor. Both are based around the idea of making computer programming easier to learn, by 'visualising' the syntax of programming, but keeping the idea of the logic, variables and operators so key to every modern programming language.
Scratch enables you to build beautiful little apps that run on a computer or a browser, (the latter being cleverly packaged up as Flash or Java) and is so accessible it's unreal.
In my mission to try and get kids programming as part of their ICT education, I think both of these tools are just what is needed. Certainly in other countries outside of the UK where I live, many educators and kids are producing wonderful stuff with them.
App Inventor is in a bit of a state of transformation right now and is not publicly accessible, so I'll give an update on that when it settles down, but essentially it takes a lot of the concepts of Scratch and puts them on your Android powered smartphone.
You could also look at www.buzztouch.com for android and iOS app building. (Needs some work through Xcode to get into the app store)
ReplyDeleteThanks Chris. I'm playing as we speak! I've tweeted it into the Twittersphere too.
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