Random Monday : Scratch - Interactive Media For The Masses
A project by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group of MIT Media Labs with financial support from the National Science Foundation, Intel Foundation and the MIT Media Lab, Scratch is a educational interactive content creation tool aimed primarily at kids to create their animations, stories and games in a very easy to learn scripting language. Just think of it as a very simplified Flash and you’ve got the general idea how Scratch works. Picked up this interesting authoring tool up from Games For Gamers site.
Animation and interaction is built into your project by dragging and dropping predefined scripts and linking them together. It’s extremely easy to construct a decent animation in several minutes since zero programming is required. Programming constructs like loops and conditions can be utilized for more advanced tasks. There isn’t a way to create scripts other than the ones you see in Scratch but if you require that level of functionality, you’re probably better off learning and using Flash 
That said, the scripts included are directly more than adequate for most tasks. Below are the diagrams for two of my test scripts
Any interactive media project requires images which you can create directly in Scratch directly or import from existing files. A library of images and sounds is installed with Scratch by default. Below is a very simple interactive game which I cooked up in half an hour where the hungry shark has to eat the starfish flying from side to side. Don’t ask why
There’s extensive documentation like getting started guides and reference manuals as well as a series of flash cards in PDF format to serve as tutorials in implementing basic tasks for users new to Scratch. There’s a lot of sample projects included too if you prefer to learn from examples.
The simple and colourful interface might turn off snobbish programmers but as long as it teaches and interests kids and non-programmers in learning about logical aspects of programming (and hopefully becoming future game developers), I can’t say that’s a bad thing at all
Download Scratch from MIT Media Labs.
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[...] the NSW education system failing to keep up with the modern world. Something that has been lauded anywhere you care to look as a great way to teach programming without kids realising they are learning, has [...]