As a keen Scratch user (OK, Scratch fanboy) I was rather excited to find that Scratch 2.0 is now in public beta for anyone to try out. I really like it and think it has some major improvements over the older Scratch 1.4. To help explain the changes, I made this video that takes you through some of the new features and explains some of the new UI design.
You can only log into 2.0 using a Scratch account created prior to January 26, although you can still use it without an account. (You just won’t be able to share your projects on the Scratch website yet) A huge cheer to Mitch Resnick and the team at MIT for their work on this… Scratch is a fantastic resource for education and it leads the way as a tool for teaching computational thinking to younger students.
Scratch 2.0 Beta: What’s new? by Chris Betcher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Hi Chris, nice summary of the changes to Scratch. You mentioned about Flash on iPads…it is possible now if you use CS6 and a free download called createjs http://www.createjs.com/#!/CreateJS
I went to a workshop last week and was shown this which was created using Flash and works on the ipad…
http://www.acetraining.com.sg/animation/animation.html so things are changing!!
too bad the link doesn’t work anymore because that would be interesting to see.
Thanks Chris! As a fellow “Scratch Fanboy” I was stoked to find this blogpost and video! Not sure how I’ve missed it being out for two weeks.
The “Make a Block” has lots and lots of potential. I think you could do the “Make a block” sort of stuff with another scratch project called Panther (but I’m glad it’s in the main product now). Love the idea of using vectors, this will make all projects look so much better and more professional. And the BackPack feature reminded me of a version of MicroWorlds Logo where individual sprites had back packs. All in all, some really good features, do you know if they managed to get in the collaboration features? Teams working on code, shared projects etc?
All the best
Darrel
Thanks Darrell,
Yep I’m pretty excited by the new changes. I’m glad you found the video useful!
I’m not sure about the collaboration features. I imagine that having it on the web and in the cloud is a pretty good foundation for allowing that collaboration in the future.
epic
i was cleaning up my browser history to make it easier to manage and i clicked the forget about this website for scratch.mit.edu then i tryed to go on the scratch website and it said 404 website blocked by admistrator what do i do?