Mitchel Resnick, John Maloney, Andres Monroy-Hernandez, Natalie Rusk, Evelyn Eastmond, Karen Brennan, Amon Millner, Eric Rosenbaum, Jay Silver, Brian Silverman, Yasmin Kafai

Abstract

When Moshe Y. Vardi, Editor-in-Chief of Communications, invited us to submit an article, he recalled how he first learned about Scratch: “A colleague of mine (CS faculty),” he said, “told me how she tried to get her 10-year-old daughter interested in programming, and the only thing that appealed to her was Scratch.” That’s what we were hoping for when we set out to develop Scratch six years ago. We wanted to develop an approach to programming that would appeal to people who hadn’t previously imagined themselves as programmers. We wanted to make it easy for everyone, of all ages, backgrounds, and interests, to program their own interactive stories, games, animations, and simulations, and share their creations with one another.