What is Scratch?

At dinner last night I was talking with Erin Mulhern, who is a technology facilitator at Old Richomnd elementary school here in Winston-Salem.  She was telling me how the students at her school LOVE a program called SCRATCH.

Scratch is a programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art -- and share your creations on the web.

As young people create and share Scratch projects, they learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also learning to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively.

Erin starts out with a tutorial site:

http://learnscratch.org/

And, from there the students pick it up like "wildfire"...

It's available for download on our computers here at school, and I look forward to showing some teachers who might give it a try!

Here are a few resources with some ideas about SCRATCH:

http://blog.scratch.mit.edu/

Information from educators using Scratch:

http://info.scratch.mit.edu/Educators

News stories about scratch:

http://info.scratch.mit.edu/Scratch_in_the_News

WS/FCS In Touch blog about Scratch:

http://wsfcsintouch.blogspot.com/2010/02/programming-without-learning-code.html