Yuck – I am STILL under the weather as I write this. I can’t hear out of one ear and I still cough
quite a bit. Work has picked up and I
have also been busy getting my Christian metal album out to folks. Good thing is that I see the light at the end
of the tunnel on BOTH of these things (sickness and my album) and I can get
back to normal creative life.
But that isn’t what I wanted to write about. My wife shared with me something that I found
to be very sad – and something that I think is indicative of an ill in our
society at large.
Our kids are active programmers on Scratch. If you are not familiar with Scratch, it is a
GUI intensive programming language aimed at teaching kids the basics of
programs. Things like how to use a while
loop etc. Users on Scratch then are
naturally kids and like to program kid friendly things like online tax
software…No wait – I mean like games.
Which reminds me – need to do the taxes this weekend…
Anyway, Svetlana shared with me a very sad trend on
Scratch. She was snooping on the kids’
online activity like a good mother and looked at the online profiles of my kids’
online playmates. And for many of them,
she noticed a common theme in their profile descriptions – something along the
lines of:
I really like to make
games, but no one likes them.
Instantly my heart sank when Svetlana told me this. Gees – I know all too well what that feels
like. Somewhere out there is blistering
review of my early Christian metal and it got to me bad. So much so that I contemplated giving it up. When I look back at school – not one of my
English teachers, I think, would ever EVER recommend me to write for anything,
save maybe one. Now I am writing a blog,
a book, and other stuff which I have had some positive feedback.
I really don’t know why the above trend in my kid’s friends
on Scratch makes me sad. One point is
that other people can be so unfeeling towards others; we have through
technology reduced other people to digital information through the screen and
not realize there is a real person, flesh and blood with aspirations, who was
the catalyst for that information. Kids
nowadays don’t relate to people as people but rather output from technology.
Another point is that people are no longer happy just to do
what they do, but that they have to be accepted socially in what they do. I know that this is not easy. There is little tolerance for someone to do
something with full passion and a poor result.
If you like doing it (and not destructive to yourself or others mind
you!), what does it matter that others don’t like it? Do it anyway.
 |
| A Scratch project our kids have been working on. |
It could also be that kids just nowadays lack the patience
to develop a skill or knowledge base.
You are not going to recreate Super Mario Brothers as your first Scratch
project. It takes time to learn the
skills. Oh, and although Scratch is
meant for kids, I am sure that there are really experienced programmers (and
probably not kids) out there on Scratch.
There is a Paper (i.e. 2D) Minecraft game on Scratch which is definitely
not the work of elementary school kids (at least not normal ones). But when comparing a simple game of “click on
the cat” to something like Paper Minecraft, I wonder if kids don’t appreciate
the journey it takes to develop the skills necessary to build an awesome
program.
I think it boils down to this: you might like what you do –
heck it might be natural – but that doesn’t mean that you are good at it. At least not at first. It takes practice even in the things that we
are naturally drawn to in order to get better.
I hope that there will be some encouraging young Scratchers
to pick up their comrades and goad them on to make better things. But why stop at Scratch – we need this
everywhere.
Until next time – I’m going to try to keep my lungs in my
chest and work on some more posts and pictures for you all J
God bless,
Sven
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