Presentation: "Scratch: Making Programming Easy and Fun"

Track: END-USER PROGRAMMING / Time: Wednesday 11:30 - 12:30 / Location: Lille Sal, Musikhuset

Scratch is an interactive graphical programming environment that allows young people (ages 8 and up) learn programming while creating animated stories, interactive art, simulations, and games.

This talk describes some of the design choices that make Scratch easy to learn and fun to explore. It will interest both those who teach programming and those designing graphical programming environments for either children or adults.

Keywords: End-user programming, Scratch, Graphical programming

Target Audience: This talk will interest both those who teach programming and those designing graphical programming environments for either children or adults.

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John Maloney, MIT Media Laboratory

John Maloney

Biography: John Maloney

John Maloney is the lead developer for Scratch, a programming environment from the MIT Media Lab designed to help young people (ages 8 to 16) learn programming while creating engaging projects such as animated stories, interactive art, and games. Scratch scripts are created by snapping together colorful command blocks, making it easy to learn. Scratch has a vibrant online community; over a million Scratch projects have been shared on the Scratch website.

Prior to coming to the MIT Media Lab, John worked for Alan Kay at both Apple and Walt Disney Imagineering, where he helped create Squeak, an open source version of Smalltalk. His contributions to Squeak include the Smalltalk-to-C translator, portions of the virtual machine, the Squeak Morphic UI framework, the sound and music facilities, and the first version of Etoys, a graphical programming environment similar to Scratch.

Earlier, John worked on the Self language project at Sun Microsystems Laboratories, where he and Randy Smith created the first version of Morphic. John holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Washington.
 
Software Passion: Creating tools like Scratch that make the joy of programming available to everyone.
 
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