As a parent who used Scratch with their kids... it all started out great and then veered into being an unregulated social media network lacking any ability to create a space where they could build and learn to code in private. It wasn't long before they were doing it only for the likes and, without constant supervision, trying to figure out how to join various groups and challenges simply for the attention they would receive.
I really like the idea of Scratch, but I feel like parents and teachers who use it in the classroom should have a way to create for their kids accounts that are not part of the community aspects of the tool. Kids don't need to be doing anything online for "likes" at the age of 8 or 9.
I run the standalone Scratch program on an offline raspberry PI. My kids enjoy it. The best thing about offline is that they have to create something to play a game.
We formerly used Scratch online, starting in 2nd grade at school. It had good and bad aspects. It was great to follow griffpatch, who has really sophisticated coding tutorials. On the downside, they got creepy comments on their Scratch projects. There were also various ruses to get the kids to upvote projects, typical social media crap.
Also, being on the Scratch community means my kids could just search for someone else's clone of (insert game here). So Scratch can turn into just another way to play video games. With offline, that's not an option.
If your kids are good at self-regulation, online can be fine, though.
"...lacking any ability to create a space where they could build and learn to code in private."
Correct, this is by design, the way to go for the private/no on-line community aspects would be to use the downloadable stand-alone Scratch editor. Based on the self-selecting group of users who agree to send back telemetry usage for the stand-alone editor, we believe that over half of all Scratch users are only using the stand-alone editor. Last year this was somewhere in the range of ~100-150 million individuals worldwide.
On the website, we regularly evaluate how we can downplay the worst aspects of a social network, such as, not showing the exact count of certain indicators of likes/stars/views in various areas of the site (e.g. showing 100+ vs 203, etc.)
Yeah.. another thing is there is a lot of published games in Scratch (from other users), many are very tempting to play/try out and often the Scratch session just turns into playing those games without educational/learning activity. Anyone figured out how to avoid this?
I really like the idea of Scratch, but I feel like parents and teachers who use it in the classroom should have a way to create for their kids accounts that are not part of the community aspects of the tool. Kids don't need to be doing anything online for "likes" at the age of 8 or 9.