When comparing Lego Mindstorms vs Scratch, the Slant community recommends Scratch for most people. In the question“What are the best books or programs for teaching kids to code?” Scratch is ranked 1st while Lego Mindstorms is ranked 4th. 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.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Lots of sensors to provide input
There are many sensors available, such as infrared, video, sonar, gyros, accelerometers, controllers, and more.
Pro Control real world objects
Children are encouraged by seeing their programming efforts doing something in action, and having the result command a robot is a very tangible way of showing the outcomes of their programs.
Pro Support for multiple programming languages
There are many enthusiast projects for accessing the mindstorms API over Bluetooth to allow you to use any programming language of your choice, allowing for advancing students to graduate to more advanced languages while still controlling something familiar.
Pro Simple drag and drop interface
Mindstorms has an intuitive visual programming interface with digital previews of actions to make programming easy for beginners. The visual programming interface allows for actions, control flow, sensors, data manipulation and more.
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
Cons
Con Expensive
The base mindstorms kit costs $350 and additional sensor components range from $20 - $50 each.
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.