On Sat, Feb 5, 2011 at 9:43 PM, Mark Engelberg <<a href="mailto:mark.engelberg@gmail.com">mark.engelberg@gmail.com</a>> wrote: <div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;"> There are projects that are trivial in Scratch that are hard in Racket, and vice versa. Porting your Scratch projects to Racket is not likely to be a very productive use of your time because they have such different strengths and weaknesses. I think your best bet is to pick some projects which are in Racket's world teachpack's "sweet spot" and work on those with your son. Don't worry about trying to "replace" Scratch with Racket. My son is a fairly sophisticated Racketeer at this point but he still has loads of fun playing around with Scratch, using it for the things it is especially well-suited for and deeply enjoying its community aspects. There's nothing wrong with appreciating both. </blockquote></div> I agree in principle, but I think that there are things that _should_ be in Racket's sweet spot, but for some small and fixable issues. The whole big-bang structure is such a great idea, that the few issues that make it harder than it should be to build satisfying video games are really worth fixing. The key thing that I like pedagogically about the big-bang is the way it makes the kid think explicitly about how they're modeling the state of the game. I also think it's worth learning from the places where Scratch is successful. I think the discoverability of the primitives, and the way that the syntax is reflected in the geometry of the blocks is really fantastic. I'd love to see a version of Racket with an optional editor that looks more like Scratch's editor --- I know that this is something that people have talked about, and I think it would be a boon for young'uns who are just starting out, for whom getting the syntax right can be tricky. y