Scratch: Kids Building Software and Community

Amos Blanton, MA EdSLifelong Kindergarten GroupMIT Media Lab

Why do we need a programming language for kids?

“...it is possible to design computers so that learning to communicate with them can be a natural process, more like learning French by living in France than trying to learn it through the unnatural process of American foreign-language instruction in classrooms.”

- Seymour Papert

$availableLanguages = array( 'fr-fr' => 'fr', 'es-es' => 'es', 'ita' => 'it', 'rus' => 'ru', 'dut' => 'nl', 'de-de' => 'de', 'heb' => 'he', 'jpn' => 'ja', 'kor' => 'ko', 'ara' => 'ar','zh-cn' => 'zh-hans','zh-tw' => 'zh-hant','pol' => 'pl','ukr' => 'uk);

History of Scratch

Sharing & Co-creation

I like Scratch better than blogs or social networking sites like Facebook because we’re

creating interesting games and projects that are fun to play, watch, and download. I don’t

like to just talk to other people online, I like to talk about something creative and new.

– 13-year-old girl

I love Scratch. Wait, let me rephrase that – Scratch is my life. I have made many projects. Now I have what I call a “Programmer's mind.” That is where I

think about how anything is programmed. This has gone from toasters, car electrical systems, and

soooo much more.

– 11-year-old boy

748,158 registered members

215,873 project creators

1,659,486 projects uploaded

projects

remixes

comments

projects,remixes

Remixing

Collaboration

Remixing = forking

What about collaborative refinement?

http://scratch.mit.eduhttp://scratched.media.mit.edu