About Scratch

Mitch Resnick and the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the Media Laboratory developed Scratch as a teaching language primarily for 8 – 16 year olds, but there's nothing stopping the rest of us from enjoying the Scratch experience and sharpening our creative minds.

Encouraging everyone to think programmatically

The natural reaction of people is to see Scratch as a means of teaching computer science and integrating it into classrooms of all levels. There are teachers who use Scratch across a variety of subjects as seen on the ScratchEd site. The ScratchEd site caters to the educational community and aggregates a lot of Scratch resources, including lesson plans and tips. However, the approach and thoroughness of the included material varies greatly. You can check out ScratchEd at http://scratched.media.mit.edu/.

While writing this book, I did not set out to write a computer science textbook. It's quite simply a tutorial for people who want to learn how to use Scratch to create stories, animations, games, or art. It primarily addresses the parents, home school families, and teachers who may not be programmers themselves but want a fun way to help their children become more digitally literate. Everyone, however, can use this tutorial to learn Scratch, and many young students have worked through the Version 1.4 of Scratch of this book. I expect young scratchers will be more than capable of working through the projects in this edition.

My underlying belief is that knowing how to program can benefit everyone, but not everyone needs to be a programmer. The mental work required to create a program inherently develops an understanding of how computers work, sharpens our critical thinking skills, and gives us lots of practice at solving problems.

There's also an increasingly popular idea that sometimes we want to create applications for personal use. Of course, system administrators have always created custom scripts to help automate repetitive tasks. However, modern applications such as Scratch or the MIT App Inventor (originally developed by Google) make it incredibly easy to create programs for personal use or with the intention of sharing it with a small group of friends, which counters the perspective that learning to program is synonymous with wanting to be a professional programmer or an application developer.

When you have a little bit of programming knowledge, you'll approach non-programming problems in a different way. For example, I've used programming as a marketer to manage search engine optimization and keyword research on business websites. I've also used my programming knowledge to write automated software tests.

Bottom line, programming becomes a tool in your problem-solving toolbox. This is the key to understanding how I approach this Scratch tutorial. I want the computer scientists to come along for the ride, but I'm catering to a broader audience.

Sample Scratch uses

I couldn't begin to suggest every possible way for you to use Scratch; that's why we have an imagination. However, here are a few ideas to get you started:

• Use Scratch to teach yourself or your students how to program. That's the obvious one.
• Use Scratch to demonstrate Math concepts. Scratch can also demonstrate the x and y coordinate system in an interactive way.
• Use Scratch to inspire your kids to read and write. Find a story and animate each scene or encourage them to animate the story. Turn their haiku into a Scratch project.
• Have a child who only wants to play video games? Make a deal. Your child can only play the games he creates or remixes with Scratch.

As you work through the examples in this book, write down your project ideas no matter how hard, easy, obvious, or silly they seem. The next one might be your best idea yet.

Computational thinking

Learning: we do it for life. We should help our children develop skills that will help them keep learning and solving problems in an increasingly digital environment. Using Scratch, we will learn how to design, think, collaborate, communicate, analyze, and program in a computer language.

You may frame the Scratch approach as computational thinking. According to Wikipedia:

Computational thinking is a problem solving method that uses computer science techniques. The term computational thinking was first used by Seymour Papert in 1996.

By the time we make our cat dance for the first time, we'll forget all about the academic research and theories behind Scratch. Instead, we'll focus on having fun and creating the next project.