Scratch
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#1 2009-09-11 13:26:10
Animation-ish - competing commercial product.
I didn't see any postings about this, so I started this new one. I just found out that my kids' school will be adopting Animation-Ish. It's similar to scratch, but the interface looks slicker. I suggested Scratch to save money, but the new school district technology director is partial to the commercial product.
I saw a brief demo and the start-up page includes 3 levels of difficulty for animation. It might be helpful for scratch to introduce easier interface settings to allow for younger children to get started playing with it as well. The other item included in the commercial product are a bunch of tutorial videos.
It's good to look at the competition to see what they might be doing better so that scratch can be improved. I much prefer to see more open source products used by government and public education, but sometimes the commercial products have simpler or better user interfaces and that's frequently a major selling point to adopting a product.
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#2 2009-09-14 17:39:15
Re: Animation-ish - competing commercial product.
Well, this is not a bad topic, but,
1. Scratch is as simple as is gets. The interface could be tweaked a bit, but not a lot can be improved with Scratch's easy programming system.
2. Why would we compete with Animation-ish, (or more importantly, it with Scratch) when it's 59 dollars a pop?
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#3 2009-09-14 18:36:39
- cheddargirl
- Scratch Team
- Registered: 2008-09-15
- Posts: 1000+
Re: Animation-ish - competing commercial product.
wchen wrote:
I didn't see any postings about this, so I started this new one. I just found out that my kids' school will be adopting Animation-Ish. It's similar to scratch, but the interface looks slicker. I suggested Scratch to save money, but the new school district technology director is partial to the commercial product.
I saw a brief demo and the start-up page includes 3 levels of difficulty for animation. It might be helpful for scratch to introduce easier interface settings to allow for younger children to get started playing with it as well. The other item included in the commercial product are a bunch of tutorial videos.
It's good to look at the competition to see what they might be doing better so that scratch can be improved. I much prefer to see more open source products used by government and public education, but sometimes the commercial products have simpler or better user interfaces and that's frequently a major selling point to adopting a product.
Hey wchen, since you are considering about using Scratch in a classroom learning environment, you may be better interested in checking out http://scratched.media.mit.edu, a website geared to help others in instructing about Scratch. 
Everything is better when you add a little cheddar, because when you have cheese your life is at ease
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