Magic vocabulary learning

This Spring, I taught Scratch to kids ages 10 to 14 at my homeschool coop. Some kids had Lego programming experience, and most had none. We had only six 75-minute meetings. I offered no formal introduction of computer terms, and we had very little discussion time overall, probably 15 minutes total.

At the end of the class I went through a basic programming vocabulary list from a Computer Science 101 class, such as "conditional statement" and "infinite cycle". I read those dry formal definitions... Students understood EVERY SINGLE TERM from their own projects and those of classmates. They explained what each term meant in their own words, told me what particular game mechanics it could support, and provided examples from their code. In other words, they gained pretty deep, highly applied and connected understanding of programming concepts and vocabulary, without any formal instruction whatsoever. They gained that knowledge from working, reading comments on the site and forums for help, and asking one another and me particular project questions. It felt like magic.

Now, here is some real learning power of the platform, and the community of practice surrounding it!