Scratch (programming language)

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Scratch
Scratch Logo.svg Scratch cat large.png
Paradigm(s) event-driven, imperative
Appeared in 2006
Designed by Mitchel Resnick
Developer MIT Media Lab Lifelong Kindergarten Group
Stable release 2.0 (May 9, 2013)
Typing discipline dynamic
Major implementations Scratch
Influenced by Logo, Smalltalk, HyperCard, StarLogo, AgentSheets, Etoys
Implementation language Squeak, ActionScript (Scratch 2.0)
License GPLv2 and Scratch Source Code License
Usual filename extensions .sb (Scratch 1.4 and below) .sb2 (Scratch 2.0)
Website scratch.mit.edu

Scratch is an educational programming language[1] and multimedia authoring tool that can be used by students, scholars, teachers, and parents for a range of educational and entertainment constructivist purposes from math and science projects, including simulations and visualizations of experiments, recording lectures with animated presentations, to social sciences animated stories, and interactive art and music. Simple games may be made with it, as well. Viewing the existing projects available on the Scratch website, or modifying and testing any modification without saving it requires no online registration.

Scratch allows users to use event driven programming with multiple active objects called "sprites". Sprites can be drawn — either as vector or bitmap graphics — from scratch in a simple editor that is part of the Scratch, or can be imported from external sources, including webcam.

Version 2.0 of Scratch is currently available online and as a desktop beta for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.[2][3] The source code of Scratch 1.x is made available under GPLv2 license and Scratch Source Code License.[4]

Origin of name[edit]

The name was derived from the turntablism's technique of scratching[5](i.e. mixing sounds), relating the ease of mixing sounds to the ease of mixing projects made with Scratch.

History[edit]

The first version of Scratch was developed in 2003 by the Lifelong Kindergarten group, led by Mitchel Resnick, at the MIT Media Lab.[6]

The old (original) scratch.mit.edu website with it's launch in 2006

The first official website was originally launched in 2006. Scratch 1.0 was then later available to the public for download in January 8 2007.

The Scratch website after the release of public project sharing

In March 2007, project sharing was possible and the whole Scratch website was completely redesigned. The public were able to create, share and remix their own projects as well as others.

Scratch continued to update their site until late 2012 when they released Scratch 2.0 which offered many updates to the programming system and website design

User interface[edit]

Screenshot of Scratch 2's development environment at startup

From left to right, in the upper part of the left column there is a "stage area" featuring the results (either in small or normal size, full-screen also available) and all sprites thumbnails listed below the stage.

In the middle column in its upper part there are ten tabs: scripts, costumes, sounds, looks, motions, operators, sensing, events, data and more blocks. Under "Scripts tab", eight groups of blocks, each of its own color and shape, appear. Individual block (i.e. command) is testable under different conditions and parameters via double-click, or it can be dragged onto the scripts area to be part of the script governing a selected sprite.

In blue color are blocks governing movement, whereas those governing a selected sprite's looks, sound, pen, control, sensing, operators (in versions 1.3.1 and lower, the operators group was named "numbers" group), variables (that can be either local or global), and "more blocks", are in violet, pink, dark green, orange, brown, goldenrod, light blue, light green, and ultramarine, respectively. When the group is clicked, all the blocks belonging to the group appear for selection and dragging.

In the right column there is a script area featuring scripts, consisting of dragged blocks, that are linked to a selected sprite. Additionally, far right there is an expandable help area.

In pre-2 version, the blocks palette was on the left, in the middle were the selected sprite area and scripts area associated with a selected sprite, and the stage area with sprites thumbnails listed below it were in the right column.[7]

Community of users[edit]

Scratch is used in many different settings: schools, museums,[8] community centers, and homes. For example, younger children can create projects with their parents or older siblings, and college students use Scratch in some introductory computer science classes (including Harvard's introductory computer class).[9][10] Via localization files downloaded with Scratch its interface language can be changed to a language of choice since Scratch is used in different parts of the world. The Johns Hopkins University Center for Talented Youth offers an online course on Scratch programming for students in grade 6 and up through the CTYOnline program.[11]

Empirical studies were made of various features—those that interfered with intuitive learning were discarded, while those that encouraged beginners and made it easy for them to explore and learn were kept. Some of the results are surprising, making Scratch quite different from other teaching languages (such as BASIC, Logo, or Alice).

Online community[edit]

The Scratch online community's slogan "Imagine, Program, Share" indicates that sharing and the social aspects of creativity are important parts of the philosophy behind Scratch.[12] A few influential members of the Scratch online community made great personal strides in innovative methods with scratch programming.

Scratch projects are not seen as black boxes but as objects for remixing to make new projects. Projects can be uploaded directly from the development environment to the Scratch website and any member of the community can download their full source code to study or to remix into new projects.[13][14] Members can also create project galleries, comment, tag, favorite and "love" others' projects and share ideas. Projects range from games to animations to chatbots. All projects on the website are shared under a Creative Commons attribution and share-alike license and can be played in a web browser (using the Flash Player, which are not available for iPhones/iPads). The website receives close to 10 million page views per month[15] and as of January 2, 2013 it had 1,349,093 registered members (however, only 402,697 users have shared projects), and over 4,200,000 projects (every minute more than one project gets uploaded).[16] The website frequently establishes "Scratch Design Studio" challenges to encourage creation and sharing by providing users with a basic design concept. There are custom home pages for Mexico and Israel that display local content in some sections of the home page. There are also local independent Scratch websites in countries such as Portugal[17] and the United Arab Emirates.[18] In 2008, the Scratch online community platform (named "ScratchR") received an honorary mention in the Ars Electronica Prix.[19] There is also an online community for educators, called ScratchEd.[20] Scratch is also a fun literary structure, with online roleplays that range in many different genres.

Features and derivatives[edit]

The current version of Scratch does not treat procedures as first class structures and has limited file I/O options with Scratch 2.0 Extension Protocol; an experimental extension feature that allows interaction between Scratch 2.0 and other programs. [21] The Extension protocol allows interfacing with hardware boards such as Lego Mindstorms or Arduino.[22] In addition Scratch 2 only supports one-dimensional arrays, known as "lists". Floating point scalars and strings are supported as of version 1.4, but with limited string manipulation capability. There is a strong contrast between the powerful multimedia functions and multi-threaded programming style and the rather limited scope of the Scratch programming language. On May 3, 2013, Scratch closed for 3 days to update to Scratch 2.0. The update changed the look of the site and included an online project editor. A new beta version of the Scratch 2 Offline Editor is currently available. This version replaces the old Scratch 2.0. [23]

A number of Scratch derivatives [24] called Scratch Modifications have been created using the source code of Scratch version 1.4. These programs are a variation of Scratch that normally include a few extra blocks [25] or changes to the GUI.

Some of them additionally introduce shifts in underlying approach to computing, such as Build Your Own Blocks or shorter BYOB, by not only allowing users to "build their own blocks", but featuring first class procedures (lambda), first class lists (including lists of lists), and first class truly object oriented sprites with prototyping inheritance, which are not part of Scratch.[26] BYOB was developed by Jens Mönig[27][28] with documentation provided by Brian Harvey[29][30] from University of California, Berkeley and has been used to teach "The Beauty and Joy of Computing" introductory course in CS for non-CS-major students.[31]

The source-code of Scratch and its derivatives are based on Squeak, which is based on Smalltalk-80. Version 2 of Scratch is implemented in ActionScript, with an experimental JavaScript-based interpreter being developed in parallel.[32]

See also[edit]

Portal icon Free software portal

The following youth computing projects also originated in the MIT Lifelong Kindergarten Group:

Other educational programming languages include:

References[edit]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Scratch (programming language).
  1. Jump up ^ Black, Lucy (7 December 2011). "A Programmer's Guide to Scratch 1.4". Retrieved 25 January 2014. 
  2. Jump up ^ "Updated Scratch 2.0 Offline (Beta) is now available!". Scratch. 29 August 2013. Retrieved 25 January 2014. 
  3. Jump up ^ "Scratch 20 Preview". YouTube. MITScratchTeam. 1 May 2013. Retrieved 25 January 2014. 
  4. Jump up ^ "Scratch source-code download page". Scratch Documentation Site. Retrieved 25 January 2014. 
  5. Jump up ^ Schorow, Stephanie (14 May 2007). "Creating from Scratch". MIT News Office. Retrieved 25 January 2014. 
  6. Jump up ^ Resnick, Mitchel; Maloney, John; Monroy-Hernandez, Andres; Rusk, Natalie; Eastmond, Evelyn; Millner, Amon; Silver, Jay; Rosenbaum, Eric; Brennan, Karen; Blanton, Amos; Silverman, Brian; Bonta, Paula; Kafai, Yasmin; Peppler, Kylie. "Scratch Credits". Scratch Documentation Site. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Retrieved 25 May 2007. 
  7. Jump up ^ ICWSM 2010 : Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, May 23–26, 2010. Washington, D.C.: AAAI Press. 2010. ISBN 9781577354451. OCLC 844857775. 
  8. Jump up ^ "Traffic and Demographic Statistics by Quantcast". Quantcast. Retrieved 25 January 2014. 
  9. Jump up ^ "Scratch Statistics". Scratch. Retrieved 25 January 2014. 
  10. Jump up ^ "Scratch". Scratch (in Portuguese). 
  11. Jump up ^ "Scratch". Scratch (in Arabic). Retrieved 25 January 2014. 
  12. Jump up ^ "Prix Ars Electronica". Ars Electronica. Archived from the original on 6 July 2011. Retrieved 25 July 2014. 
  13. Jump up ^ "ScratchEd". ScratchEd. Retrieved 25 January 2014. 
  14. Jump up ^ "Scratch Extension Protocol (2.0)". MIT. 
  15. Jump up ^ "Preliminary Scratch extension for talking to Arduino boards running Firmata". Scratch extension GitHub. Damellis. 
  16. Jump up ^ "Updated Scratch 2 Offline Editor". Scratch Announcement homepage. MIT. 
  17. Jump up ^ "Scratch Modification". Scratch Wiki. Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab. 
  18. Jump up ^ "Blocks". Scratch Wiki. 
  19. Jump up ^ "BYOB homepage". University of California, Berkeley. 
  20. Jump up ^ Mönig, Jens (June 2007). "Jens on Scratch". Scratch. Retrieved 25 January 2014. 
  21. Jump up ^ "Mönig's blog post announcing BYOB as bringing protypal inheritance to Scratch". Chirp. 31 May 2011. Retrieved 25 January 2014. 
  22. Jump up ^ "HomePage for Brian Harvey". Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences. Retrieved 25 January 2014. 
  23. Jump up ^ Harvey, Brian (July 2008). "Brian Harvey user contributions page". Scratch. Retrieved 25 January 2014. 
  24. Jump up ^ "The Beauty and Joy of Computing course homepage". EECS Instructional Support Group Home Page. Retrieved 25 January 2014. 
  25. Jump up ^ "We're seeking contributors to help finish our HTML5 Scratch player (now open sourced!)". Scratch. Retrieved 25 January 2014. 

External links[edit]

Wikibooks has a book on the topic of: Scratch
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