Courtesy: Scratch Wiki
As someone who's been coding for a while, I've seen countless attempts at making coding more accessible to beginners. However, none have quite captured my attention like Scratch, the coding IDE created by MIT. I would also like to preface this article by saying - The whole point of this article isn't to blindly praise the Scratch IDE, but rather my attempt to observe UX around me and take note of the amount of thought designers put into making their creations.
What immediately drew me to Scratch was its visually pleasing interface. With colourful characters and backgrounds, it was clear that the designers understood their target audience of young children and designed an experience that was not only educational but pleasurable to use. In fact, I've seen firsthand how Scratch has introduced children to the world of coding and sparked an interest in STEM fields.
One of the most impressive aspects of Scratch is how it incorporates colour coding to distinguish between common programming paradigms such as variables, functions, and loops. This is especially helpful for beginners who are just starting to learn about coding. With the introduction of the new make-your-own-block function, users can now easily create their own custom functions - a concept that can be quite difficult for novices to grasp. Scratch's thoughtful design helps bridge this gap and makes the process much more intuitive.
Another detail that I appreciate about Scratch's design is the shape of its input holes. Some blocks in Scratch require inputs, but the shape of these input holes was very cleverly designed by MIT. Different input types have different shaped holes - for example, Booleans are angular while text or numbers are round. This not only helps learners distinguish between input types but also emulates the parentheses we use while programming in C, supporting a smooth transition from Scratch to more advanced programming down the road.
All in all, I'm constantly amazed by the thought and care that went into designing Scratch. From its colourful characters and backgrounds to its intuitive interface and cleverly designed input holes, it's clear that the team at MIT put a lot of effort into making coding accessible to children and beginners. Scratch is a great example of how good design can make a world of difference in the user experience, and I'm excited to see what other innovations will come out of the tech industry in the years to come.