Animation and Robotics

If Scratch can be taught to eight year olds, how useful is it anyway?

Scratch, like Alice, and Etoys, was developed to make learning the logic and concepts of programming easy and allow the student to move past the frustrating and tight syntax requirements of more advanced computer languages like C.  Scratch is much more forgiving, intuitive, and immediately rewarding so the students can focus on understanding the concepts – loops, threads, statements, events and boolean expressions – that are the underpinning of most programming languages.  And keep in mind, they were developed for and are used by the college freshmen taking introductory computer science courses at MIT, Carnegie Melon, and yup, even Harvard (not that they are such the bastion of CS, but take a look at their intro course that features Scratch – http://academicearth.org/lecture/introduction-to-programming-and-scratch  its pretty funny.)