Home Scratch: Programming for All Mitchel Resnick, John Maloney, AndreÌs Monroy HernaÌndez, Natalie Rusk, Evelyn Eastmond, Karen Brennan, Amon Millner, Eric Rosenbaum, Jay Silver, Brian Silverman, Yasmin Kafai, Scratch: Programming for All, Communications of the ACM, vol. 52, no. 11, November 2009. When Moshe Vardi, Editor-in-Chief of CACM, invited us to submit an article about

Scratch, he shared the story of how he learned about Scratch: A couple of days ago, a colleague of mine (CS faculty) told me how she tried to

get her 10-year-old daughter interested in programming, and the only thing that

appealed to her daughter (hugely) was Scratch. Thatâ€™s what we were hoping for when we set out to develop Scratch six years ago. We

wanted to develop an approach to programming that would appeal to people who hadnâ€™t

previously imagined themselves as programmers. We wanted to make it easy for

everyone, of all ages, backgrounds, and interests, to program their own interactive stories,

games, animations, and simulations â€“ and to share their creations with one another. Scratch is the cover story of the November 2009 issue of CACM. The goal of Scratch is to get kids programming so that they become more fluent in information technology, and develop "computational thinking" skills. Scratch is a graphical language based on a collection of â€œprogramming blocksâ€ that children snap together like Lego blocks to create programs. The programs themselves appear to be imperative in nature (at least based on the samples in the CACM article). Programs can be made concurrent by creating multiple stacks of blocks, and the authors claim that their goal is to make concurrent execution as intuitive as parallel execution. Scratch was previously mentioned on LtU here. Comment viewing options Flat list - collapsed Flat list - expanded Threaded list - collapsed Threaded list - expanded Date - newest first Date - oldest first Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.