I’ve been doing Scratch with kids recently and while it’s fun, I’m looking for something next level. Specifically things like no shared custom blocks across sprites is becoming problematic (copy paste issues). Any recommendations?

Do you want it to still be a block language? If not, consider: https://bootstrapworld.org

ooh interesting - thanks! doesn’t have to be a block language.

curious how the scratch has been going, and how old they are? my angle is i have 2 kids (11 and 12) whose parents have been paying me for the past 2 years to teach them computers, and in the time i've been trying all sorts of stuff

I don't have much experience in this area (you know, teaching actual kids), but I have looked quite a few things that might be appropriate: • https://developers.google.com/blockly • https://easylang.online • https://snap.berkeley.edu • http://www.hedycode.com • https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/makecode I'd be curious if anyone has pros/cons of these to share — I've been collecting a list, but haven't tried any of them.

my oldest has expressed interest in programming; we started with scratch, and, after about a year-ish of a little bit of that I’ve been slowly working in some tic-80. Tic-80 is nice because it offers flexibility of syntax (fennel, janet, lua, wren, javascript, scheme, and I think a few others) while balancing out it being really quick to get something to show up on screen.

@Eli Mellen 👍🏻 I think games and art are especially good for this purpose, both because they’re visual and (usually) innately interesting to kids, but also because the work products can be shared with friends, which is a very strong motivation for most neurotypical humans

1000% to that, @Jack Rusher -- when I was young, in middle and high school, I think that is exactly why I was so drawn to web stuff. The immediacy of typing into a little css/html interface and having stuff appear in the browser was lovely and empowering. Neopets forever ✊

Snap! removes most limitations of Scratch, has lambdas and everything, is really "Scheme in sheep's clothing". The paradigm of of "tell object X to execute this piece of code in its scope" is imho a nice stepping stone to OOP and state management without the formalities of encapsulation & named methods. (OOP purists might disagree?) I've been using NetsBlox which is fork of Snap! with multiplayer game support. Havent really got multiplayer to work yet, and i found the IDE a little buggy.

A few more links I ran across, both using LOGO: • https://fmslogo.sourceforge.io • https://inexorabletash.github.io/jslogo/

try https://www.hedycode.com/ crafted as a teaching programme, gradually learnable until you end up in python

thank you all for the great suggestions.