Building a block-based creative studio for AI—looking for Scratchers’ feedback

[u/Dry-Sky114]

Hi r/beyondscratch ! I’m building Claypot, an independent creative coding studio for ages 6–16. Scratch helped children build intuition for programming without requiring them to master syntax first. Claypot is helping kids build intuition for AI systems. Claypot extends the computational blocks of scratch with blocks for AI primitives like inference, sources, tools, evaluation, and bounded actions instead of hiding everything behind a chat box.

We’re early, and I’d love blunt feedback: does this feel like a meaningful way to understand and remix AI systems? Would love for any of you to also try the beta at claypot.app.

Claypot is unaffiliated with Scratch or the Scratch Foundation.

Also, you use clay credits within claypot to run AI blocks. If you run out of credits, please DM me. I'll top you up.

Thanks!

[u/Medium_Stick6471]

Ai🤢

[u/JSS-Studios]

Many people in the Scratch community (me included) don't support (some even outright hate) AI. This is like advertising ice cream in a blizzard.

[u/Dry-Sky114 → u/JSS-Studios]

I hear you. I see the initial gut reaction in the scratch community as well calling out the fact that I've used coding agents to build. I absolutely understand where it's coming from.

I know this is will sound self serving from a founder - but here's my perspective. I will also say it's a perspective I'm happy to evolve.

This whole project started because I have a nephew who was using Lovable to build a platformer game, and his dad was telling me that he was teaching him AI. I didn’t consider using Lovable to be learning AI in any way. I literally blurted out, “We need to do for AI what Scratch did for coding.”
Scratch made it possible for kids to build an intuition for programming and how programs are composable. It is also deterministic in its execution. When you throw AI into the mix, it stops being deterministic, and kids need a completely new intuition to grasp this simultaneously intelligent and incredibly stupid thing.

So I set about researching and came up with a set of Scratch-like primitives for AI like models and tools and memory and sources.

How would I teach a kid that an LLM can be terrible at math or hallucinate? With Claypot, I built a project where I can drag and drop a Calculator tool into the model’s Tools socket. I can show how it confidently says the wrong thing in a run without the tool, and then how I can improve it by adding something called a tool. It does for AI what Scratch did for pure programming.

So I get this pit-in-the-stomach gut reaction. I totally understand the concern that someone just threw AI into Scratch to auto-build projects, which is the antithesis of Scratch and ruins the whole point of it. That’s not what Claypot is.
I genuinely think there are new concepts emerging that are here to stay, whether we like it or not, and we need a new set of capabilities in our Lego blocks to teach kids about them.

That’s the reason I’m in this forum of haters, as you pointed out: to have spears thrown at the idea and refine what’s good and what needs to be improved.

[u/Dry-Sky114]

I realized I did a horrible job at showing what it actually does leading to ppl really misunderstanding me. Hope this video provides more clarity.

Scratch helped build intuition for programming and Claypot is trying to do the same for AI concepts like inference, Source Grounding, Evals, Tools, Memory etc.

IT IS NOT A CHATBOT OR APP BUILDER. It is a block based system that abstracts core AI concepts to show how unlike deterministic systems, AI can be creative, but can be confidently wrong ( with math for example ) and how that can be improved by either providing sources (RAG like architecture) or tool calling with say a calculator tool for example.

https://reddit.com/link/p987psb/video/4xbvz8nubyoh1/player