Scr0100: scratch overview

Scratch is available free of charge and is currently available for Mac OSX, Windows, and Debian / Ubuntu.

Some statistics

As of March 15, 2013, the Scratch home page indicates that 3,171,004 projects have been created (and that number is increasing by about 230 projects per hour or 4 projects per minute) .

According to an article published by MIT personnel

"On the morning of May 14, 2007, the (Scratch Online Community) website was officially launched. Several news outlets and social newswebsites featured the Scratch website on their front pages. In a matter of hours the server and the website could not handle the traffic andthe website went down several times."

If I did the arithmetic correctly, this represents an average of one new project every minute being posted on the website since the inception of thewebsite in 2007. Of course, many other projects have been created but not published on the website.

Many archived projects are readily available

Thousands of archived projects are available for online execution and/or downloading and examination at the source code level. Thus, the amount ofresource material available to budding Scratch programmers is almost limitless.

Post, review, and comment

MIT makes it possible for every scratcher (as the members of the Scratch community refer to themselves) to share his or her projects for online execution and/or downloading and examination by other scratchers.MIT also makes it possible for other scratchers to review and critique the projects shared by others. Registration is free and open to everyone.

MIT seems to make a significant effort to hide the true identities of the registrants and also seems to make a significant effort to ensure that theposted material is age appropriate for middle school students. (See Community Guidelines .)

An organized system for peer review and critique is provided. The system is too elaborate for me to describe. If you want toknow more about it, simply register (become a scratcher) and take a look at it for yourself.

A world-wide phenomenon

This is not just a United States phenomenon. The scratchers are located in many different countries around the world. A forum is providedfor scratchers to exchange information with one another. As of this writing, that forum is available in at least fifteen different languages.

Also, many scratchers whose first language is not English participate in the English version of the forums and provide English-language descriptions of theirprojects when they publish them.

Demographics

An article published around 2008 stated that based on the first five months of usage data,

"...users are primarily age 8 to 17, with a peak at age 12. A good number of users are adult computer hobbyists and educators that createprojects in Scratch, even though a lot of them know other professional programming languages. Some members of the community have emerged asmentors that help the beginners and provide advice."

The article also stated,

"While 70 percent of users are male, no correlation was found between gender and the number of projects... This indicates that even thoughthe majority of users are male, the females are as engaged in creating projects as the males."