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I was really pleased to read about Scratch for the first time today. I started programming when I was 9 years old on a ZX81 which was at the time instantly accessible. Part of the reason for this was due to the fact that to get any entertainment out of the machine you had to write it yourself or type in something from a magazine.

I then made a strange leap to the Texas Instruments TI99/4a which although very popular in the US (so I understand) it was a extremely rare beast in the UK. I am still unsure even to this day on how we came to owning one. After the Texas came probably the best learning tool for programming you could possibly get back then.

The BBC Micro Model B was a work of genius and had a really accessible version of BASIC plus you could inline 6502 straight into your code. I had already tinkered with Z80 but the Beeb allowed my assembler knowledge to grow quickly.

The common theme amongst my early years was one of accessibility and instant gratification. Although the graphical results back on the ZX81 & BBC Micro were extremely limited compared with todays standards, it was still possible to generate something that could still make my parents go ‘wow’.

Since those days things have slowly gone downhill in getting children engaged with programming. The reasons for this have been many, but a requirement of any programming language for the young must be that they can create something in a short space of time that still has that ‘wow’ factor.

When I downloaded Scratch today I was genuinely surprised to find something that was not only accessible but also amazingly fun to play with. Now I do not have any kids myself but I still class myself as still being a child at heart and this thing had me hooked from the first minute.

I would recommend any of the programmers out there who read my blog go out and download Scratch, write something interesting and share it on the site. Not just for yourself but also to give the kids out there using Scratch some demonstrations of what can be done.

Some other articles about Scratch

• Where’s the 8 bit revolution for my kids?
  
• Scatch lets kids interact creatively
  
• Coding Made simple