Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children
Full disclosure: Principal Software Engineer here on the Scratch backend...<p>Scratch is not built to be a &quot;teach your kid programming languages&quot; system, it is based on the work and ideas of the Life Long Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab (the director of this group is Professor Mitch Resnick, the LEGO, Papert Professor of Learning Research). The Papert part is where the term Mindstorms comes from (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Mindstorms-Children-Computers-Powerful-Ideas&#x2F;dp&#x2F;0465046746" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Mindstorms-Children-Computers-Powerfu...</a>) and was used by the Lego Group when branding those products, and our philosophy is heavily influenced by that.<p>I can say that the <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;scratch.mit.edu&#x2F;statistics&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;scratch.mit.edu&#x2F;statistics&#x2F;</a> are real and we have a substantial footprint of backend services and custom software to support it. We handle on the order of 15-20 million comments&#x2F;month.<p>The primary design philosophy is:<p>Passion: You have a strong interest in a subject&#x2F;problem to solve&#x2F;explore
Projects: Build something based on your passions, gain directly interactive experience with it.
Peers: Share your work with folks who are interested and provide feedback to you
Play: It should be fun!<p>Note that there is nothing in there about STEM&#x2F;STEAM nor application development. We build and support Scratch to provide creative tools for anyone to explore computation in a from that is relatable and has a low floor for understanding&#x2F;entry.  Having said that, the complexity of what Scratch can do rises sharply the more you work with it and the concepts behind &quot;forking&quot; and opensource are built in via the remix ability on individual projects.<p>A lot of design thinking goes into the frontend of Scratch to build on a creativity feedback loop that is not focused on learning Python or any other specific language (or the syntax of them, i.e. avoid &quot;why isn&#x27;t my program working... oh, one too many tabs... or maybe this semi-colon, or maybe this .&quot;)<p>Another part I think is worth raising, the Scratch frontend is a sophisticated virtual machine interpreter that has it&#x27;s own machine code and model that is executing in a Javascript environment in browser and it is still open source. Google&#x27;s Blockly project was based on the ideas of Scratch 1.4 and when we ported Scratch 2 away from being Flash based, we partnered with the Blockly group to fork their code base and create Scratch Blocks.<p>Based on the TIOBE index, we&#x27;re usually somewhere in the top 20 most popular &quot;programming languages&quot;. _eat it Fortran!_