Scratch That

A few months back A took a class at the AVA gallery for Lego Mindstorm, which is one of those boy-centric, nerdy science kid classes where they program robots to have mock battles in a ring. It involved building your robot, programming it to stay within a defined area, and then to push its opponent outside of it. It was, to say the least, a really cool class, and she absolutely loved it. She has definite engineer’s blood in her, though she was also the only girl in the class.

During that class we learned of a program called Scratch, which was developed by the good folks over at MIT. I’d never heard of it, but the AVA also offered a class on it. Kids can learn to program their own video games, which I’m not a huge fan of, but thought it was a cool idea.

The program is free, which as you know speaks volumes to me, so I downloaded it on the kid’s computer, and A took off with it. She loves it, it really speaks to her graphic/design/storytelling sensibilities. N gets to join in the fun because A designs the games for N to play, and eventually he’ll figure out how to do it, and soon we’ll have a house full of engineers, as well as one real man in training.

Kind of fun. Until the next time, thanks for reading, and thanks to Ingela Hansson for the pic.