The latest version of a tool used to teach kids how to program video games, animations and interactive art is now open source. The Scratch 2.0 editor and player can now be found in GitHub under the GPL version 2 license.
“Two great ways of helping Scratch are helping us identify bugs and documenting them as issues or fixing issues and creating pull requests,” the Scratch team wrote in the GitHub repository.
(Related: Robots that use Scratch to teach coding)
The Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab created Scratch to help kids ages 8 to 16 learn how to think creatively, reason systematically and work collaboratively—all skills that the Scratch team believed are essential for life in the 21st century.
“The ability to code computer programs is an important part of literacy in today’s society,” according to the Scratch website. “When people learn to code in Scratch, they learn important strategies for solving problems, designing projects and communicating ideas.”
Scratch is not only a programming language, it is also an online community where kids can share their projects with people from all over the world. Last year’s release of Scratch 2.0 brought that community into the cloud.
Scratch has been used in more than 150 countries and is available in more than 40 languages. While Scratch is directed toward kids, it can be used by all ages and has been used in introductory computer science courses, schools, libraries, museums and community centers, according to the Scratch team.
More information about Scratch is available here.
