On the heels of its second birthday, Scratch, the modular programming language created as an educational toy for young people, is out in a new release featuring support for smaller devices such as netbook computers, better Webcam integration and support for keyboard input.

Release 1.4 of Scratch has been available for download since July 3, 2009, from the MIT Media Lab, according to Karen Brennan, an MIT Ph.D. candidate and member of the Scratch development team.

In its two-year history, Scratch has attracted a worldwide following, with about 1 million downloads of the software. Programs are constructed by snapping together colorful modules. Completed programs are uploaded to the Scratch Website to be shared with others.

“We wanted to appeal to people who don’t think of themselves as programmers. Certainly that has happened—300,000 people have registered for the site, and 460,000 projects have been created,” said Brennan.

Although created with young people and computer novices in mind, Scratch is not a stranger to the commercial world. Samsung has created Softboard, a Scratch derivative for mobile telephones. In addition, NEC uses Scratch to program its PaPeRo interactive personal robots. Scratch has also found its way into computer science classes at such institutions as Harvard University and the University of California at Berkeley, according to Brennan. Plus, Scratch comes preloaded on the XO-1 computer, previously known as the “$100 laptop.”

The Scratch development environment is implemented in Squeak, a Smalltalk development environment. Mitchel Resnick, the LEGO Papert professor of Learning Research, director of the Okawa Center and director of the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab, is the creator of Scratch. The software download, as well as access to all the projects that have been uploaded, is available at http://scratch.mit.edu.