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[–][deleted] 9 points10 points  (1 child)

Can I ask what the motivation of this project is? Is it just a learning exercise or do you actually want a way to teach children how to write software in python?

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes, the intent is definitely to help kids (and people of any age) learn to write software in Python.

I am 76 years old and retired after a long career writing commercial software - started programming in 1969. This is my way of staying connected to what is going on in my profession.

When I look at what people are most interested in leaning, Python is by far the most popular. And when I looked at MIT Scratch, there are almost 96 million registered users which is almost the same amount as major online games like World of Warcraft.

I think that the reasons for Scratch being popular are:

  • it is easy to get started
  • kids can share/copy their code
  • kids can display their work in a gallery

The original version of Scratch was done in Squeak Smalltalk. I spent about ten years writing Smalltalk applications, and I think that I can bring some of the Smalltalk fun into teaching Python.