What is Visual Programming?
Visual programming is a GUI (graphical user interface) based form of programming that involves the use of visual blocks that represent a construct in text based programming like a block that deals with conditionals. Visual programming is used within game development in game engines like Unity and Unreal engine and outside game development engines in Scratch.
What is Scratch?
Scratch is a block based visual programming language that allows users to create their own interactive stories, games and animations. It comes with blocks that can be linked to perform a task that you would have to write out in text based programming syntax in another language like C or Python. It can be accessed via the internet or can bedownloaded onto your computer for local use.
Why Start With Scratch
Scratch is the perfect introduction to programming when teaching children aged 7+ as its graphical user interface is perfect for grabbing their attention and keeping it. It would be difficult to teach a child programming using a language like python as it is purely text based and is not as straight forward as scratch. This also means the language is a great start for adult beginners to programming as it is easy to pickup and build something with immediately.
Furthermore, scratch uses different color blocks to allow it’s users to more easily create mental associations of those blocks to computing concepts e.g. control structures like conditionals and loops having the color orange and operators having the color green.
This allows users of scratch to focus more on building their logic, problem solving skills and understanding of the core programming concepts instead of focusing on syntax rules like forgetting a comma in a function argument or a semi-colon at the end of a statement. Often times, starting with scratch can be a great stepping stone to more advanced text based programming languages like the aforementioned general purpose programming language known as python.