Hopscotch–Visual Programming for iPads

is a new programming environment for the iPad. It is heavily influenced by Scratch from MIT but has nothing like the features of Scratch. It’s only in beta and the developers are talking about making it “Turing Complete” which will make it a lot more useful than it is now. Little kids may play with it for some time but I ran out of ideas in about 5 minutes. Of course having many much more capable tools available and usable by me may be a factor there.

The main advantages of Hopscotch are that it is available on the popular iPad and that it is really optimized for touch. The only other touch enabled development I know that is optimized for mobile programming is TouchDevelop and that is a bit much for very young children. It’s not as cute and colorful as Hopscotch either.

At the present stage of development Hopscotch is a less than full featured turtle graphics program. It can be fun I’m not convinced that it is ready for prime time - school and/or after school programs to introduce programming. The potential is there and I’ll be looking to see how development does.

By the way I have a collection of other tools for Teaching Programming with block programming elsewhere.