Our top favorite site is Scratch!
“Scratch is a programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art -- and share your creations on the web.
As young people create and share Scratch projects, they learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also learning to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively.”
It is Free to download and associated with MIT Media Lab. You can check out their website here! I like the fact that there are no bugs or pop-up windows on their site.
Within the first hour of playing around with Scratch, my then six and eight-year-olds were making their own animations. Brilliant! My boys are lucky because they have friends and cousins who are older than them and have shown them a lot of helpful hints and such. But even with out that, your kids (and you too) can figure it out by trial and error. They even have tutorials on the site as well. There is also a page set up specifically for educators!
It is really fun! I have played around with it and made my own little animations as well.
My kids don’t upload their creations to the site yet, as I think they are a bit young for that. But they do build and create their own games and stories and could spend hours on them; if I let them.
My nine-year-old is now making his own games with Scratch. And they are fun and hard to win. When I play one of his latest games he has updated or tweaked, he is so sweet and changes the level to “easy” so I can play it.
Check it out and tell me what you think!
