New Scratch Release: Youthful Language Will Play on Netbooks
Stan Gibson | Date: 07-07-09 | Comments: 0
- Already boasting a worldwide following, the modular programming language created for the non-programmer now supports netbooks and keyboard input.
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.
