The moment my daughter created her first project in Scratch – a simple animation of a cat chasing a butterfly – her relationship with the computer transformed completely. Suddenly, she wasn’t just consuming content; she was the one making things happen on screen. Two years and countless projects later, I can articulate exactly why Scratch is such a fantastic programming language for children and an excellent creative playground for young minds like hers in general.
Content
- Meet Scratch: A Programming Language Children Love
- Getting Started With Scratch
- Main Challenges with Scratch
- Beyond Scratch: What Comes Next?
Meet Scratch: A Programming Language Children Love
Developed by the MIT Media Lab in the early 2000s, Scratch is a colorful, intuitive playground where children can bring their ideas to life.
Unlike traditional programming languages that can overwhelm children with complex syntax and cryptic semicolons, Scratch uses a visual approach that makes perfect sense to young minds.
Each programming concept is represented by a distinct colored block: purple for looks, blue for motion, yellow for control, and so on. These blocks snap together like puzzle pieces in logical ways, and you’d be surprised how much you can do with them.
Want to make a character move when you press the space bar? Just grab an “event” block. Need to remember the player’s name throughout the game? Create a variable with a single click. These concepts that might sound intimidating in a traditional programming course become as natural as building with blocks.
Even functions, a concept that can challenge adult learners, emerge naturally in Scratch. When my daughter realized she wanted several of her characters to perform the same dance routine, she discovered she could create a custom block in the “My Blocks” section to avoid repeating the same code.
The best part? Unlike traditional programming languages for beginners, where you often see just text output in a boring terminal window, everything you create in Scratch comes alive instantly on screen. With a single click of the green flag, my daughter could watch her characters dance, interact, and move exactly as she imagined.
Getting Started With Scratch
Getting started with Scratch couldn’t be easier. It runs right in your web browser at scratch.mit.edu, though there’s also a downloadable version available for Windows, macOS, ChromeOS, and Android if you prefer working offline. We opted for the web version since my daughter uses a Raspberry Pi as her computer (the offline version doesn’t support Linux).
While you can start creating projects right away without an account, I decided to create one for my daughter so she could save her work and join the community of young creators.
For her first creation, we decided to keep things simple: an animation of a cat chasing a butterfly. One of Scratch’s most appealing features is its extensive library of sprites – pre-made, animated characters and objects that kids can use in their projects, so adding the butterfly was as easy as clicking the “Choose a Sprite” button. Conveniently, the cat sprite is already present by default, so we didn’t even need to add that.
Once the stage was set, it was time to add some logic. I showed my daughter how to use event blocks like “when [space] key pressed” to make the cat move closer to the butterfly. We used simple motion blocks such as “move [10] steps,” which allowed her to see the result of her commands instantly. To make it interactive, we added a conditional check with the “if” block to detect when the cat touched the butterfly. When that happened, we triggered a sound block so the cat would meow.
The simplicity of dragging and snapping these blocks together made it intuitive for her to understand the flow of actions. Even at this early stage, she grasped the logic behind “if-then” statements and event-driven programming without realizing she was learning fundamental programming concepts.
Main Challenges with Scratch
While Scratch is designed to be child-friendly, we did encounter two hurdles along the way. Here’s how we tackled them.
Early Reading Struggles
The biggest initial obstacle wasn’t technical at all, it was literacy. When we first started with Scratch, my daughter’s reading skills weren’t quite developed enough to understand all the block descriptions and button labels independently.
Photo by
Tiger Lily
Rather than letting this hold her back, I turned it into an opportunity for shared learning time. I sat with her during her early programming sessions, reading labels and explaining what different blocks did. Within a few months, she was reading block descriptions on her own, and her programming vocabulary and tech literacy expanded naturally alongside her reading skills.
Project Size Limitations
The only technical challenge we encountered came from Scratch’s project asset limits. You see, each project can contain multiple assets, but each asset must be up to 10 MB large. While that’s plenty for sprites and short sound effects, we still ran into size issues when my daughter started adding background music of her own production.
The solution was to be smarter about audio files. Instead of using the WAV files that come directly from recording, we started converting them to MP3 format using Audacity, a free audio editor. This compression typically reduced file sizes by 80-90% while maintaining acceptable sound quality.
Beyond Scratch: What Comes Next?
As wonderful as Scratch is at introducing programming concepts through visual blocks that children find engaging, there comes a time when young coders might want to explore text-based programming. After all, that’s what real programming is all about.
My daughter isn’t quite ready for full text-based programming yet, so we’re taking an intermediate step with Microsoft’s MakeCode, which is very similar to Scratch because it also uses blocks to teach programming. But unlike Scratch, MakeCode also allows young coders to switch to text-based programming and implement more advanced logic in JavaScript or Python.
For older children who are ready to dive straight into text-based languages, Python and JavaScript make excellent starting points. Both offer clean, readable syntax and extensive libraries for creating games and graphics, perfect for young programmers who want to build on the concepts they learned in Scratch.
Cover image and screenshots by David Morelo.
David Morelo –
Staff Writer
David Morelo is a professional content writer in the technology niche, covering everything from consumer products to emerging technologies and their cross-industry application. His interest in technology started at an early age and has only grown stronger over the years.
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