When comparing Scratch vs Crystal Space 3D, the Slant community recommends Scratch for most people. In the question“What are the best 100% free and easy game engines for beginners?” Scratch is ranked 25th while Crystal Space 3D is ranked 39th. The most important reason people chose Scratch is:
Code is represented as [visual building blocks](http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-use-Scratch/) that makes it easy to understand how a program is put together.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Visual
Code is represented as visual building blocks that makes it easy to understand how a program is put together.
Pro Great starting point for kids
Scratch was developed specifically for kids ages 8 and up as an exciting way to introduce them to technology. It's designed to be easy to learn, but still provides good depth in computational thinking.
Pro Easy to learn
Scratch is designed to teach computational thinking rather than focus on specific syntax. It was designed specifically to be easy to learn for anyone over the age of 8.
Pro Highly structured
The language is highly structured. Therefore, it gives you the essentials of how to think like a programmer and teaches you good programming practices from early on, so you could write clean, working and readable code in the future.
Pro No need to be able to type
Pro Can be used to create games
Pro Scripting language bindings (via swig) python, perl, tcl
Scripting language biddings are available via swig, supposedly any swig target could be used If you are okay with building, and probably maintaining, the project for your own needs then you may be able to build bindings for your favorite scripting platform.
As noted in a slant "con", there are no binary releases, including no prebuilt bindings.
Pro Cross platform
Runs on all major desktop platforms.
Cons
Con For kids
For kids.
Con Won't get you a job
Scratch is not a language used in the workplace. Instead it teaches computational thinking, helping to create a foundation to aid in learning other languages.
Con Does not teach you programming
Learning Scratch might help you if you have high difficulty with logical thinking. However, starting with a proper programming language, especially an easy one, will give you the benefits of starting with something like Scratch and everything else.
Con Strange OOP
Scratch has a very strange implementation of OOP that is sprite based, and will become very confusing when you move to other languages.
Con Weird
It's straight up weird.
Con No binary releases.
Expect to compile this from source if your want to play with it.
Ubuntu has a package for it, but that package appears to be missing it's scripting language bindings. I expect the build is also quite old and i fear may be dropped in coming Ubuntu releases.