Many young people are well versed in playing video games, yet few have actually created their own interactive programs and then shared them on the Web for others to enjoy. Scratch, intended for 8- to 16-year-old students, is a recently emerged programming language developed by the LifeLong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab and made available in a free download in 2007. It allows users to develop their own interactive stories, games, and animations. Students integrate mathematical and computational skills, geometric relationships, and systematic reasoning, with creative problem solving techniques.
Although diffusing rapidly (548,512 registered members), the open-source site suffers from the lack of a viable marketing campaign. The technology, for the most part, relies on word-of-mouth in social and professional networks for people to become involved in the Scratch community. Even though the site has several tutorials to help guide the user, they are inadequate for covering the over 100 programming blocks. Instead, Scratch depends on the creativity, experimentation, and discovery process of the user and the ability of the user to view previously developed programs to interpret how the programs were designed. This can be rather intimidating for those who take tentative steps regarding new technologies. The technology would benefit from easy-to-follow curriculum plans that are linked to national technology and content standards.
According to Silver (n.d.), Scratch is a tool that can easily be integrated into any curriculum at school, but it suggests to the learner that this is a technology that would be fun to use at home. It is a technology that reaches across curricula and cultures to engage students in creative problem-solving tasks. It encourages students of all ages to mix media (graphics, sound, color, motion) and then share the product online. Perhaps the greatest advantage of Scratch is the open-source nature of the site. Users can collaborate, communicate, experiment, break apart and alter programs in the process of running them, and learn from the greater global community of Scratchers. This, indeed, represents the real power of online learning.
You can learn more about Scratch and download it here: http://scratch.mit.edu/
ScratchEd is an online community created for specifically for educators. It includes articles, resources, and a discussion forum. You can find it here: http://scratched.media.mit.edu/stories
The following site includes several demonstration and instructional videos to help a novice get started with Scratch: http://info.scratch.mit.edu/Support/Videos
Silver, J. (n.d.). Media Lab Video [Interview] Retrieved from http://info.scratch.mit.edu/Support/Videos
