Links

Scratch was launched in May 2007 by the Lifelong Kindergarden Group at the MIT Media Group and is written in Squeak. There are some similarities to StarLogo (produced by some of the same team at MIT) but Scratch throws away much of the legacy of Logo in favour of the creation of streamlined programming environment for young programmers to create sophisticated sprite based applications.

Some relevant links are listed below but please email us with any links you think we should include here.

Scratch

The Scratch website at http://scratch.mit.edu is the main Scratch portal and contains forums, a portal for contributing and downloading projects and the Scracth software itself which is free to download. There is a special ScratchEd forum for teachers and educators using Scratch in School and a Scratch Connections wiki for programmers interested in network prorgramming for Scratch.

Learning Scratch

There are some great resources for Scratch beginners on the support pages of the Scratch website at MIT: 

• Scratch Getting Guide - a 17 page reference to most of the Scratch functions.
• Scratch Cards - a collection of cards to print out illustrating different topics such as how to move a sprite to a drum beat.
• ScratchEd is an educators website with plenty of discussions and resources.

Third party training resources include:

• Our redware Scratch lessons and sample projects designed for all ages to learn Scratch.
• LearnScratch.org is a comprehensive set of video tutorials and lesson plans from the Christian Brothers University in Memphis for schoolchildren to learn Scratch.
• Scratch for Budding Computer Scientists tutorial written by David Malan (a lecturer at Harvard University) for teenagers and adults wanting to learn scratch and get a good idea of some of the principles of competer science.
• Dan Hawk (a student at the University of Wisconsin) has created a Scratch tutorial for older children.
• Scratch Programming for Teens is a book by Jerry Lee Ford Jr (ISBN 978-1598635362) which covers all of the features of Scratch.

Some topics from the Scratch forum:

• Great tips for improving your Scratch games and a link to some sprite resources.
• How to run Scratch programs from your own web server.

Other interesting sources of information include:

• A short television program on Scratch on the ideas for life website.
• A wiki for Scratch educators.
• YouTube video from Tinkernut for creating animated gifs using unfreez for windows.

Academic Papers

• Scratch for Budding Computer Scientists is a five page review of experiences teaching Scratch to youngsters concluding that Scratch is a viable introduction to computer programming.
• Sratch Proposal paper from MIT with details of inspiration from computer clubhouse activities.

Other Languages

A related MIT project is StarLogo which uses the blocks metaphor to create Logo programs. We prefer MSWLogo for teaching young programmers Logo and have some partly prepared resources for Logo (we abandoned this approach when we discovered Scratch).

StarLogo is suitable for teenagers who are experiencing some of the programming limitations of Scratch although you may also want to consider Flash or Java and C# for a more traditional programming environment. We would recommend that you consider teaching JavaScript to teenagers that are moving on from Scratch as it is a programming language with relevance to anyone using the web,

Further Study

• Grey Walter Thompson ...
• Subsumption Architecture ...
• Bratenberg ...