Here are my comments/observations:
Assembly programming is such a pain in the ass. Are there c++ compilers for the NES chip?

PC gaming always had the plus of a stable architecture. The Quake 3D engines make an easy starting point for games that look semi-decent without starting from scratch. Programming in an environment like this would be more familiar to young programmers looking to get their feet wet.

It’s going to be hard to expand the community beyond hobbyists and into the masses without more powerful graphics. A hobby community could eventually gain strength though. I cant wait for a good gameplay on the level of Bubble Bobble and Super Bomber Man.

I understand your point with regards to systematic thinking when I was looking it over for the first time, for example - seeing how you were using controls to teach iteration without really having to get out a intro book and explain the concept of a loop.

I enjoyed slapping together some quick implementations of a barrel shifter and full adder in the digital logic sim. (http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/jay/495)

I think I may have been overly harsh on what your lab has accomplished, and am writing a second post right now addressing some of the points you brought up.
Most of this is due to cynicism, and experience with working with kids (and even adults in the past) where as soon as they realize that they can loop a belch.wav file in the lab, any higher purpose goes out the window pretty fast.

I strongly feel that getting young people excited and involved in technology is something our field hasn’t been doing a good job of it recently. It’s nice to see that I’m not the only one who cares, and others are trying to do something about it.

I hope that you can find time to write some feedback on my next post regarding this matter!

I hope you’ll take a look at some of these projects (and also download the software and create your own projects!), and see if that changes your view about Scratch.

Regarding your comment: “Most bothersome to me is the total lack of coding involved via the drag and drop interface”… You seem to equate “coding” with writing strings of text. For me, the most important part of “coding” and “programming” is learning to think systematically, and that definitely happens when people learn to “code” in Scratch. When people create Scratch projects, they learn key computational concepts such as iteration, conditionals, variables, event-triggering, and threads — and, perhaps most importantly, they learn about the process of design and debugging. It is true that you would not want to use a drag-and-drop graphical interface like Scratch to create a very big, complex program. But we believe that Scratch provides a very good introduction to the core ideas of programming and “coding”, and provides a very good foundation if people decide to move on to other more traditional programming languages later.

However, I am in the process of creating a response to the coordinate system essay question — it will be absolute brilliance. I promise.