As Wikipedia states, „Scratch is a free desktop and online multimedia authoring tool that can be used by students, scholars, teachers, and parents to easily create games.” It can be used as a first step in learning computer programming, or to create animated lessons, simulations and visualizations of experiments, or animated stories. Scratch may be considered a visual programming environment, and it can be accessed at http://scratch.mit.edu. Scratch has a community of more than 8.7 million of users, and it can be used in more than 50 languages, including Romanian. One can see the existing projects available on the Scratch website. Also, visitors can modify and test any modification without saving it. If you want to upload your project on the Scratch site, you have to register. We consider that Scratch is suitable as a first tool for 7-14 years old kids, for their introduction in computer science.
Thus, we have held some free courses for young students and teachers:
- Super Scratch Programming Adventure for pupils from Plopana, Rusenii-Razesi
- Introduction in programming with Scratch at Buhusi
- Scratch course for students and teachers
- Scratch with kids from Botesti and Barticesti
Below you can find some Scratch projects we have worked on with the kids, and you can download them for free.