ScratchJr, and what comes after it

If your child is between five and seven, you may already know ScratchJr. It’s a free app from the team behind Scratch, made for young children, and it’s a lovely first taste of programming: snap picture blocks together and a character moves, jumps and talks.

Parents often ask us the same question: what comes next?

The usual next step is a big jump

The common answer is Scratch, which is wonderful and made for older kids. It asks for more reading, more planning and a blank stage to fill. Plenty of seven-year-olds love it. Plenty of others hit a wall: they can make a cat say hello, but turning that into a game they want to play is a long way off.

Where Game Creators Club fits

Game Creators Club is for kids 5 to 9, and it starts somewhere different. Instead of an empty stage, a child starts inside a real game with real levels: a meadow to bounce through, critters to herd, a robot factory to fix. Each game has a brain, the rules that make it work, and a child can open it at any moment and watch those rules fire.

So the first thing a child learns isn’t how to build from nothing. It’s that every game they’ve ever played is made of rules, and that they can read them.

The same ideas, a longer runway

The rules are still picture tiles, so a non-reader can follow them. But the ideas underneath are the ones programmers use, one per lesson: events, numbers that change how much, order, loops, variables, if-statements, messages, else, state, random, functions and debugging.

Each idea climbs three steps. It’s Seen when a child finishes its lesson, Used once it works in a game they changed, and Owns when they use it in a game of their own. At Owns, the app gives it its real name, so “Again” becomes “a loop”, right when a child has earned the word.

Fixing comes before making

Every lesson has the same rhythm: play a level, peek at its brain, guess what a change will do, fix what’s broken, then make something of your own with the new idea. Fixing first means a child always has a working game to compare against, and always knows what “done” looks like.

Not instead of ScratchJr

If your child loves ScratchJr, keep it. Making little stories with it is a fine way to spend an afternoon. Game Creators Club is for the kid who wants to know how games work, and then wants to make one that’s really theirs.