Monday, March 13, 2017

Script Academy

In a comment to a post on Reaktor Blog, a guy called Evgeni pointed me to a site called Script Academy. It's a site for kids to learn coding. And it looks promising! It has a treasure map too!



And it promises "After completing this course, your child will be able to create simple games and share them online." 

Well, we tried it with my 8-year old veteran coder girl who's used Vim at the age of 4 but since then gravitated towards other interests like 3D printing and playing the violin. Anyways, Script Academy starts in an easy way: Just click on buttons to generate Javascript that guides the (cute!) Owl to her baby. You can see the generated Javascript code and then run it. This was easy. Except the "run" button was a bit hard to find at first. For me. For the kid, it was peanuts.

Then came the part where you have to actually write the Javascript yourself. That didn't appear to be very hard, because example code was given. But here lied a surprising catch! Here's the result.



I guess there was a bit too much freedom this time. Give a kid a text area and she'll fill it with - well - anything on her mind at the time. I love her too!

Let's see if we return to Script Academy later!