Taking Kids into Programming (Contests) with Scratch
Abdulrahman Y Idlbi · 2009
Since launching the Syrian Olympiad in Informatics (SOI) five years ago, encouraging children to participate in the contest has been a challenging task, a common problem in many places around the world. Students, and many educators as well, see programming as a tough subject to learn. In addition, the style of IOI tasks is generally considered unattractive. We started overcoming those obstacles through using Scratch, a graphical programming lan- guage developed at the MIT Media Lab. Scratch allows kids to start learning programming concen- trating on the concepts rather than the syntax, while providing them with the ability to construct diverse projects that are attractive and meaningful to them. Scratch also allows examining chil- dren's programming skills against interesting tasks, and gives them the opportunity to move more smoothly into learning a traditional language like C++ and other computer science topics.