A Look at Scratch

Site visited - www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/scratch

Scratch is a new programming language that lets the user to create their own interactive stories, animation, games, music, and art. It is a language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, games, and animations and share your creations with others on the web.

It was developed by the life long kindergarten research group at MIT media lab. This group develops new technologies that, in the spirit of the blocks and finger paints of kindergarten,expand the range of what people can design, create, and learn.

Basically,scratch is an interpreted dynamic visual programming language based on Squeak and implemented in Squeak. Being dynamic, it lets code be changed even as programs are running. It has the goal of teaching programming concepts to kids and teens and letting them create games, videos, and music. It can be downloaded for free and is being used in a wide variety of in-school and after-school settings around the world. In Scratch all the interactive objects, graphics, and sounds can be easily imported to a new program and combined in new ways. That way, beginners can get quick results and be motivated to try further.

Scratch is designed to help young people (ages 8 and up) develop 21st century learning skills. As they create and share Scratch projects, young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also learning to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively.

It became porpular in teaching teens how to program because,of the ease with which programs can be made; the statements and data structures are simple and are at least partially written in common spoken language, and the program's structure can be designed as a jigsaw puzzle is, with detachable blocks of code that can be moved around and fitted together.