Community reviews for Scratch

Scratch is a great to teach programming! It takes a little while to learn Scratch, but once you do, you can build and create easily. The program easily engages students and many will spend hours creating in Scratch!

One of the simple programming tool where students can program visually and creatively.

Scratch is a wonderful tool that focuses on coding while being applicable in all of the curricular areas. It promotes the 4 C's while also allowing educators to focus on specific content of which they are responsible for. Best of all it can be used with any platform online. Students will not only enjoy but will also learn. I especially liked the student engagement along with the collaborative spirit it brought to the classroom. It will serve students by allowing them to make their own creations while having a chance to display them to their peers, either in the classroom or online, using proper guidance by the teacher.

This is a great tool for introducing coding to students. It is a simple interface that doesn't take a huge learning curve to get around. Some of the graphics are a little lower level for Middle School kids but the experience makes up for it.

Scratch is a perfect tool to get students started with computational thinking. Scratch really achieves what MIT Media Lab was hoping for when they designed it to have "a low floor (easy to get started with), a high ceiling (opportunities for increasingly complex projects over time), and wide walls (supporting many different types of projects, so that people with different interests and learning styles can all become engaged). (1) With the new version of Scratch enabling student access through a browser and the new Studio tool, it makes it even easier for students to share their work and collaborate. The only real key piece missing, at this point, is the ability for teachers to set up a whole class, grade, or school with Scratch accounts (at this point, there are no tools to do this, but it's being planned for). http://web.media.mit.edu/~mres/scratch/scratch-cacm.pdf

The beauty, elegance and power of Scratch not only influences my teaching virtually everyday, it has influenced my entire view of technology and my view of art. Growing up I was always intrigued by the programming my father did, but it seemed like an impossible world for me to grasp. As I did worse and worse in math courses (and to a lesser extent in science), I was sure I would never really have that command... then I found Scratch. (Okay, I'm a little biased because I trained with the Media Lab as they were developing the Beta versions.) Since then I've used Scratch almost everyday for the past six years at many different venues and with many different learners and I've seen it succeed in so many ways: Scratch is not just another website with information -- maybe prettied up a little -- for youth: it is a construction environment where youth pursue a real goal and thus find a need to learn math and other concepts that never seemed important. There is little I would do differently on Scratch: there are improvements in 2.0 but it only seems to effect more advanced users (such as the ability to define variables based on the input of a camera). In my teaching, Scratch is wonderfully versatile but it is important for a teacher to lay out goals for students: much of the tool's power can go unused unless students are encouraged to "explore." The interface empowers choice though so students are not "forced" to learn commands, but want to learn these commands to reach the end of a goal that they've set. Some of my favorite Scratch projects (all resulting from simple prompts) included a simple spinning animation made by a young woman learning English, a complex, five stage, all original "scrolling" video game made by a young man interested in game design and an app to switch between different potential hair colors made by a young woman interested in dying her hair. There is a little bit of a leap from this visual programming introduction to actual coding but I've never seen anything better to not only spark interest in programming but math, English and many more facets of learning.

Scratch is a free website/download where students can create interactive games and animations. It is surprisingly easy to "program" using Scratch. All parts that can be added to the program are drag and drop (actions, sprites, sounds). Students are able to upload their own images to use in their animated project. Students are able to experience cause and effect situations through using this application, and it definitely focuses on their critical thinking and problem solving skills.

This is a great tool to get kids programming. The drag and drop block structure makes it easy to create animations and games very quickly. The one thing I find lacking is a management tool. To collect assignments, I had to create studios and manually add their user accounts, which they had to create.

Diverse tool that allows students to program things like animations, stories, and make makey instruments. Applications are endless and easy to use. Overall, the tool is fantastic and super engaging for students of all levels. I liked that it was so simple I could teach it to myself in a matter of minutes. The students enjoyed the fact that the tool allowed them to endlessly creative and the only limiting factor was their imagination.

Students as young as 1st grade are successfully coding while they think they are just playing with blocks. It is amazing to watch them learn and figure out what they need to do to make their sprite do what they want it to do.