hi....
please give me the information about the technology which was bieng used while developing the scratch programming language and what is the programming language used for developing the scratch software.I also need information about its history and future prospects.I have to present a seminar on Scratch Programming language in my university. i will be very thankful to the scratch team members for providing me with the details of each and every aspect behind Scratch software. Thanking u in Anticipation.
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i already made a thread about this, http://scratch.mit.edu/forums/viewtopic.php?id=3185
but i guess it got old so this is good. They DID use squeak to program scratch.
and dont ask me how they programmed squeak, and don't ask me how they programmed
the squeaks programm to work! lol.
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I'm surprised there isn't a "History of Scratch" section in the About section of the Home Page. I looked but didn't find one. It would also be nice to have a "Future of Scratch" section spelling out where the language might be going and areas are currently under active research.
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I think you'll find the original "mission statement" in the "research" section of this website (http://scratch.mit.edu/pages/research): It's the very first entry there: http://web.media.mit.edu/%7Emres/papers/scratch-proposal.pdf.
If you want some more history about the people behind Scratch google Mitchel Resnick and check the Squeak sites for John Maloney (I think there's a short bio of John on the Squeakland site).
Then for some idelogical "Überbau" you might want to read up on Fröbel, Piaget, Montessori, Papert, Kay etc. pp. and also google "dynabook" and "olpc". If you´re interested in technological concepts you might want to start with "Nassi-Shneiderman", Etoys, and all the MIT stuff (Lego Mindstorms, Pico Cricket, Logo etc. etc.). For the actual programming of Scratch check the Scratch source code and study Smalltalk-80/Squeak.
Need more?
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Jens, thanks for posting that.
Also, an influential book is Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas by Seymour Papert. There is actually a free version of that book in the ACM digital library.
You can take a look at our research group's website for more info on other projects going on that might shape the future of Scratch: http://llk.media.mit.edu
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I would be curious to see how you compare the initial NSF proposal to what Scratch is today.
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I forgot entirely about the Wikipedia article...it has some useful information.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scratch_%28programming_language%29
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It would be good for someone who understands the history of scratch to add a section to the Wikipedia article on scratch. I don't know enough about it to write anything.
I was interested to see "Nassi-Shneiderman" in Jens's list. I was rather fond of Nassi-Schneiderman diagrams as a programming tool around 1976, but I gave up on them as too bulky for programs more complicated than a few lines. The scratch blocks do remind me of the diagrams, though the blocks are closer to pseudocode presentations, and don't run into the problems of subparts getting too narrow that the N-S diagrams had.
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