Hopscotch is jumping along

It’s been a while since we last checked in with Hopscotch, the Scratch-like app for the iPad. In fact, looking back, seeing how Hopscotch is developing has become a roughly annual event – Hopscotch released, Version 2 released.

In the last year, Hopscotch has been making great strides in all directions and its creators have really developed it into quite a sophisticated environment while retaining its appeal. The latest release aptly demonstrates where they are going. The inclusion of maths operators really steps the app up a notch from its original quite simple instructions set:

• Sounds! You can make music and add sound effects to your games!
• An “If // Else” block to create more sophisticated conditional statements
• Fancy maths operators like square root, exponents, Sine, and Cosine

The Hopscotch team continue to thoughtfully encourage creativity. I was particularly interested to see them remove the capacity to get the most ‘likes’ for a program as it was being milked unscrupulously and actually discouraging sharing. Instead they have focused their community on collaboration by encouraging the most ‘branching’ – where someone takes and develops someone else’s program.

If you have iPads in a primary school environment, or have kids that age, you really should be using Hopscotch as a matter of course. It remains free for individuals, although there are now in-app purchases, and a school version is available with everything unlocked.

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