{"slug": "scratch", "name": "Scratch", "category": "other", "category_name": "Other software", "description": "Block-based visual programming language and online community from MIT, aimed at kids.", "recommenders": 7, "commenters": 11, "warners": 0, "score": 6.832, "rising": 4.35, "first": "2025-11-09", "latest": "2026-09-12", "why": "Recommended for teaching kids to program with no setup, and many commenters credit it as their first step toward a programming career.", "why_is_quote": false, "has_verdict": true, "sentiment": {"recommend": 7, "neutral": 3, "compare": 1, "warn": 0}, "spark": [1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 5, 0], "listed": true, "loved": ["Teaching kids", "Career gateway"], "caveat": "Large-project lag", "short_quote": "I would recommend installing Scratch[1] - it's a programming language designed for kids from 8yrs old onwards.", "icon": true, "domain": "mit.edu", "github_repo": null, "official_url": "https://scratch.mit.edu", "pricing": "free", "aliases": ["Scratch", "scratch"], "verdict": [{"text": "Recommended for teaching kids to program with no setup", "cites": [{"id": 794744208, "item_id": 49671513, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49671513", "by": "ModernMech", "date": "2026-09-12", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Proceeds to make games and stories with graphics, sounds and interaction, which they share with their friends, fully editable and runnable in a web environment with zero setup", "excerpt": "Here's how teaching kids goes without scratch: \"This is python, we use it to do professional development work. Here's VS code, we use it to do professional development work. Let's learn them.\" 6 year olds: \"Okay!\" Proceeds to mangle whitespace, variable names, scope, indexing, ==, forgets :, doesn't understand what def is, even after they get all that the program is basically \"hello world\" print to console. 6 year ol", "context": "teaches kids", "use_case": "teaching kids programming", "switched_from": "", "story": "\u03bb Snap \u2013 An inviting programming language for kids and adults for CS study"}, {"id": 792460944, "item_id": 49528809, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49528809", "by": "anon291", "date": "2026-09-01", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use scratch to teach my kids programming.", "excerpt": "You have to have a certain grit to really succeed in STEM. The key lie of the kits is that... it's not easy. If having things be easy is your thing, then this is not something you want to do. And I don't mean 'easy' by 'not requiring work'. There are many easy things that are themselves lucrative careers because they require work that people don't want to do / aren't good at. STEM is 'hard' in the sense that there's ", "context": "parent", "use_case": "teaching kids programming", "switched_from": "", "story": "Has early Scratch experience led to fulfilling careers?"}, {"id": 792276944, "item_id": 49517309, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49517309", "by": "bgoated01", "date": "2026-09-01", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "My kids are learning on Scratch. 10 and 9 years old, been doing it for a few years at this point.", "excerpt": "My kids are learning on Scratch. 10 and 9 years old, been doing it for a few years at this point. The older one has had the opportunity to switch to Python but keeps going back to Scratch. He can make less trivial things than I used to make with Mark Overmars' GameMaker when I was a teen, and I'm now a C++ developer. So it would seem like a high possibility. He's done pathfinding algorithms, raycasting, file loading/", "context": "C++ developer with two kids", "use_case": "kids learning programming", "switched_from": "", "story": "Has early Scratch experience led to fulfilling careers?"}, {"id": 733838016, "item_id": 45864876, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45864876", "by": "d3Xt3r", "date": "2025-11-09", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I would recommend installing Scratch[1] - it's a programming language designed for kids from 8yrs old onwards.", "excerpt": "I would recommend installing Scratch[1] - it's a programming language designed for kids from 8yrs old onwards. I would recommend pairing it with a Raspberry Pi, as you can do fun real-world physical stuff with using Scratch, and I think kids can find that very interesting. Eg, start with a simple program to turn LED lights on and off, programming buttons, playing sounds etc. Eventually this could lead to making simpl", "context": "", "use_case": "teaching kids programming", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: How would you set up a child\u2019s first Linux computer?"}]}, {"text": ", and many commenters credit it as their first step toward a programming career.", "cites": [{"id": 792469872, "item_id": 49529367, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49529367", "by": "desertrider12", "date": "2026-09-01", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "scratch was the trigger for me just as you say.", "excerpt": "scratch was the trigger for me just as you say. I was turning 11 when we used it at school (28 now). A year or so later I was reading Java for Dummies and making little tools on the TI-84. Then learning C++ and python on a raspberry pi 1B. I\u2019m grateful to that computer lab teacher who thought scratch was worth teaching.", "context": "", "use_case": "learning programming", "switched_from": "", "story": "Has early Scratch experience led to fulfilling careers?"}, {"id": 792268656, "item_id": 49516791, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49516791", "by": "outlore", "date": "2026-09-01", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I used scratch in cs50 to make a music platformer. I would say it led me down a career in computing", "excerpt": "I used scratch in cs50 to make a music platformer. I would say it led me down a career in computing", "context": "", "use_case": "learning programming", "switched_from": "", "story": "Has early Scratch experience led to fulfilling careers?"}, {"id": 794629760, "item_id": 49664360, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49664360", "by": "aspizu", "date": "2026-09-11", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Scratch is how I first learned programming.", "excerpt": "Scratch is how I first learned programming. I was building increasingly ambitious projects in it, and at some point the editor itself became the main thing I was fighting. Once a project got to around 10,000 blocks, it could get painfully laggy, and I ended up spending a lot of time engineering around Scratch's limits. That is what eventually led me to build goboscript: https://github.com/aspizu/goboscript I'm one of", "context": "software engineer who learned on Scratch", "use_case": "learning programming", "switched_from": "", "story": "\u03bb Snap \u2013 An inviting programming language for kids and adults for CS study"}, {"id": 794779584, "item_id": 49673724, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49673724", "by": "ModernMech", "date": "2026-09-12", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "most of my students (I have taught thousands) report having their first programming experience in Scratch", "excerpt": "> However it was not to the degree where this guy's response was warranted at all. Not one bit. Agreed. > so is the conclusion that Snap is perfect for what it's intended and that there is no room for criticism or opposing views against it? That's going too far in the opposite direction, no one has claimed that at all. Your opening post was \"this is BS and just a toy, it's got no connection to the real world.\" That w", "context": "teacher who has taught thousands of students", "use_case": "teaching kids programming", "switched_from": "", "story": "\u03bb Snap \u2013 An inviting programming language for kids and adults for CS study"}]}, {"text": " Caveats include painful lag on very large projects", "cites": [{"id": 794629760, "item_id": 49664360, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49664360", "by": "aspizu", "date": "2026-09-11", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Scratch is how I first learned programming.", "excerpt": "Scratch is how I first learned programming. I was building increasingly ambitious projects in it, and at some point the editor itself became the main thing I was fighting. Once a project got to around 10,000 blocks, it could get painfully laggy, and I ended up spending a lot of time engineering around Scratch's limits. That is what eventually led me to build goboscript: https://github.com/aspizu/goboscript I'm one of", "context": "software engineer who learned on Scratch", "use_case": "learning programming", "switched_from": "", "story": "\u03bb Snap \u2013 An inviting programming language for kids and adults for CS study"}]}, {"text": " and reported security flaws such as SVG-based XSS and claimed code execution.", "cites": [{"id": 766853296, "item_id": 47928331, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47928331", "by": "nmilo", "date": "2026-04-27", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I'm sorry because I love the scratch project", "excerpt": "I'm sorry because I love the scratch project but this has to be said: they found XSS in SVGs in a surface with attacker-controlled access to Node and their fix was sanitizing it using regex??? And this was discovered by a user on scratch? Even worse, OP's latest post \"Every version of Scratch is vulnerable to arbitrary code execution\" just tells you how exactly to exploit something similar today in the current versio", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "The Woes of Sanitizing SVGs"}]}], "praise": [{"label": "Teaching kids", "summary": "Parents and teachers use it to introduce children to programming.", "quotes": [{"id": 792460944, "item_id": 49528809, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49528809", "by": "anon291", "date": "2026-09-01", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use scratch to teach my kids programming.", "excerpt": "You have to have a certain grit to really succeed in STEM. The key lie of the kits is that... it's not easy. If having things be easy is your thing, then this is not something you want to do. And I don't mean 'easy' by 'not requiring work'. There are many easy things that are themselves lucrative careers because they require work that people don't want to do / aren't good at. STEM is 'hard' in the sense that there's ", "context": "parent", "use_case": "teaching kids programming", "switched_from": "", "story": "Has early Scratch experience led to fulfilling careers?"}, {"id": 792276944, "item_id": 49517309, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49517309", "by": "bgoated01", "date": "2026-09-01", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "My kids are learning on Scratch. 10 and 9 years old, been doing it for a few years at this point.", "excerpt": "My kids are learning on Scratch. 10 and 9 years old, been doing it for a few years at this point. The older one has had the opportunity to switch to Python but keeps going back to Scratch. He can make less trivial things than I used to make with Mark Overmars' GameMaker when I was a teen, and I'm now a C++ developer. So it would seem like a high possibility. He's done pathfinding algorithms, raycasting, file loading/", "context": "C++ developer with two kids", "use_case": "kids learning programming", "switched_from": "", "story": "Has early Scratch experience led to fulfilling careers?"}, {"id": 753967537, "item_id": 47122971, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47122971", "by": "techteach00", "date": "2026-02-23", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Grades 3-5 use Scratch.", "excerpt": "Thank you for the suggestions. I think I realize the problem after reading many of the posts. What's slowing these devices down is the management software running over them. GoGuardian and whatever else IT has on them. We also aren't allowed to use an ad blocker anymore. I used to have Ublock installed on all the devices before GoGuardian prevented it. It's a really depressing situation that I imagine will only get w", "context": "K-8 teacher", "use_case": "teaching kids coding", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Chromebook Leads for K-8 School In Need?"}]}, {"label": "Career gateway", "summary": "Several commenters say Scratch was their first programming experience and led them into computing careers.", "quotes": [{"id": 792469872, "item_id": 49529367, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49529367", "by": "desertrider12", "date": "2026-09-01", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "scratch was the trigger for me just as you say.", "excerpt": "scratch was the trigger for me just as you say. I was turning 11 when we used it at school (28 now). A year or so later I was reading Java for Dummies and making little tools on the TI-84. Then learning C++ and python on a raspberry pi 1B. I\u2019m grateful to that computer lab teacher who thought scratch was worth teaching.", "context": "", "use_case": "learning programming", "switched_from": "", "story": "Has early Scratch experience led to fulfilling careers?"}, {"id": 792268656, "item_id": 49516791, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49516791", "by": "outlore", "date": "2026-09-01", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I used scratch in cs50 to make a music platformer. I would say it led me down a career in computing", "excerpt": "I used scratch in cs50 to make a music platformer. I would say it led me down a career in computing", "context": "", "use_case": "learning programming", "switched_from": "", "story": "Has early Scratch experience led to fulfilling careers?"}, {"id": 794629760, "item_id": 49664360, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49664360", "by": "aspizu", "date": "2026-09-11", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Scratch is how I first learned programming.", "excerpt": "Scratch is how I first learned programming. I was building increasingly ambitious projects in it, and at some point the editor itself became the main thing I was fighting. Once a project got to around 10,000 blocks, it could get painfully laggy, and I ended up spending a lot of time engineering around Scratch's limits. That is what eventually led me to build goboscript: https://github.com/aspizu/goboscript I'm one of", "context": "software engineer who learned on Scratch", "use_case": "learning programming", "switched_from": "", "story": "\u03bb Snap \u2013 An inviting programming language for kids and adults for CS study"}]}, {"label": "Surprisingly capable", "summary": "Kids build games, pathfinding, raycasting and file saving, and some prefer it over switching to Python.", "quotes": [{"id": 792276944, "item_id": 49517309, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49517309", "by": "bgoated01", "date": "2026-09-01", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "My kids are learning on Scratch. 10 and 9 years old, been doing it for a few years at this point.", "excerpt": "My kids are learning on Scratch. 10 and 9 years old, been doing it for a few years at this point. The older one has had the opportunity to switch to Python but keeps going back to Scratch. He can make less trivial things than I used to make with Mark Overmars' GameMaker when I was a teen, and I'm now a C++ developer. So it would seem like a high possibility. He's done pathfinding algorithms, raycasting, file loading/", "context": "C++ developer with two kids", "use_case": "kids learning programming", "switched_from": "", "story": "Has early Scratch experience led to fulfilling careers?"}, {"id": 794744208, "item_id": 49671513, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49671513", "by": "ModernMech", "date": "2026-09-12", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Proceeds to make games and stories with graphics, sounds and interaction, which they share with their friends, fully editable and runnable in a web environment with zero setup", "excerpt": "Here's how teaching kids goes without scratch: \"This is python, we use it to do professional development work. Here's VS code, we use it to do professional development work. Let's learn them.\" 6 year olds: \"Okay!\" Proceeds to mangle whitespace, variable names, scope, indexing, ==, forgets :, doesn't understand what def is, even after they get all that the program is basically \"hello world\" print to console. 6 year ol", "context": "teaches kids", "use_case": "teaching kids programming", "switched_from": "", "story": "\u03bb Snap \u2013 An inviting programming language for kids and adults for CS study"}]}, {"label": "Zero setup", "summary": "Projects with graphics, sound and interaction run and stay editable in the browser with zero setup.", "quotes": [{"id": 794744208, "item_id": 49671513, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49671513", "by": "ModernMech", "date": "2026-09-12", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Proceeds to make games and stories with graphics, sounds and interaction, which they share with their friends, fully editable and runnable in a web environment with zero setup", "excerpt": "Here's how teaching kids goes without scratch: \"This is python, we use it to do professional development work. Here's VS code, we use it to do professional development work. Let's learn them.\" 6 year olds: \"Okay!\" Proceeds to mangle whitespace, variable names, scope, indexing, ==, forgets :, doesn't understand what def is, even after they get all that the program is basically \"hello world\" print to console. 6 year ol", "context": "teaches kids", "use_case": "teaching kids programming", "switched_from": "", "story": "\u03bb Snap \u2013 An inviting programming language for kids and adults for CS study"}]}, {"label": "Focus on logic", "summary": "It abstracts away details so students can focus on logical building blocks.", "quotes": [{"id": 745343025, "item_id": 46583939, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46583939", "by": "njoyablpnting", "date": "2026-01-11", "stance": "compare", "quote": "Scratch abstracts away a ton of stuff to allow the student to focus on logical building blocks", "excerpt": "This is super cool! Would love to see how you hooked up Ruff and ty. Just curious, why not use Pygame? Scratch abstracts away a ton of stuff to allow the student to focus on logical building blocks that mirror the mental model one might have when writing a real program. I'm wondering if keeping a lot of those abstractions when transitioning to text programming is educationally useful? For example, it might not be cle", "context": "teaches beginners", "use_case": "teaching programming", "switched_from": "", "story": "Moving Scratch generation to Python on browser"}]}, {"label": "Physical computing", "summary": "It pairs well with a Raspberry Pi for controlling LEDs, buttons and sounds.", "quotes": [{"id": 733838016, "item_id": 45864876, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45864876", "by": "d3Xt3r", "date": "2025-11-09", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I would recommend installing Scratch[1] - it's a programming language designed for kids from 8yrs old onwards.", "excerpt": "I would recommend installing Scratch[1] - it's a programming language designed for kids from 8yrs old onwards. I would recommend pairing it with a Raspberry Pi, as you can do fun real-world physical stuff with using Scratch, and I think kids can find that very interesting. Eg, start with a simple program to turn LED lights on and off, programming buttons, playing sounds etc. Eventually this could lead to making simpl", "context": "", "use_case": "teaching kids programming", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: How would you set up a child\u2019s first Linux computer?"}]}], "caveats": [{"label": "Large-project lag", "summary": "The editor can become painfully laggy at around 10,000 blocks.", "quotes": [{"id": 794629760, "item_id": 49664360, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49664360", "by": "aspizu", "date": "2026-09-11", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Scratch is how I first learned programming.", "excerpt": "Scratch is how I first learned programming. I was building increasingly ambitious projects in it, and at some point the editor itself became the main thing I was fighting. Once a project got to around 10,000 blocks, it could get painfully laggy, and I ended up spending a lot of time engineering around Scratch's limits. That is what eventually led me to build goboscript: https://github.com/aspizu/goboscript I'm one of", "context": "software engineer who learned on Scratch", "use_case": "learning programming", "switched_from": "", "story": "\u03bb Snap \u2013 An inviting programming language for kids and adults for CS study"}]}, {"label": "Security flaws", "summary": "One commenter criticizes an SVG XSS fix done with regex and a public post claiming every version is vulnerable to arbitrary code execution.", "quotes": [{"id": 766853296, "item_id": 47928331, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47928331", "by": "nmilo", "date": "2026-04-27", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I'm sorry because I love the scratch project", "excerpt": "I'm sorry because I love the scratch project but this has to be said: they found XSS in SVGs in a surface with attacker-controlled access to Node and their fix was sanitizing it using regex??? And this was discovered by a user on scratch? Even worse, OP's latest post \"Every version of Scratch is vulnerable to arbitrary code execution\" just tells you how exactly to exploit something similar today in the current versio", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "The Woes of Sanitizing SVGs"}]}], "who": [{"by": "ModernMech", "context": "teacher who has taught thousands of students", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49673724", "date": "2026-09-12"}, {"by": "aspizu", "context": "software engineer who learned on Scratch", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49664360", "date": "2026-09-11"}, {"by": "anon291", "context": "parent", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49528809", "date": "2026-09-01"}, {"by": "bgoated01", "context": "C++ developer with two kids", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49517309", "date": "2026-09-01"}, {"by": "techteach00", "context": "K-8 teacher", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47122971", "date": "2026-02-23"}], "tags": ["for teaching kids", "for schools", "for beginners", "browser-based", "for Raspberry Pi"], "use_cases": ["teaching kids programming", "learning programming", "kids learning programming", "teaching kids coding", "teaching programming"], "compared": [], "makers": [{"id": 787812640, "item_id": 49238290, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49238290", "by": "nzoschke", "date": "2026-08-09", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I have a number of these pieces in a binary I drop first thing on every agent computer", "excerpt": "Looks nice. I have a number of these pieces in a binary I drop first thing on every agent computer: https://github.com/housecat-inc/scratch Chat to code with an inspector to point at specific DOM sections, review diffs on the box, hand off to mobile, etc. Makes me wonder where all this will end up. Or DIY win with hyper-personalized tools? Will one vendor become the center of gravity similar to VSCode in previous gen", "context": "", "use_case": "agent dev environment tooling", "switched_from": "", "story": "OpenChamber: An Agentic Development Environment"}], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49662214", "title": "\u03bb Snap \u2013 An inviting programming language for kids and adults for CS study", "mentions": 4}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49516209", "title": "Has early Scratch experience led to fulfilling careers?", "mentions": 4}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49233448", "title": "OpenChamber: An Agentic Development Environment", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47922957", "title": "The Woes of Sanitizing SVGs", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47113936", "title": "Ask HN: Chromebook Leads for K-8 School In Need?", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46551352", "title": "Moving Scratch generation to Python on browser", "mentions": 1}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {"recommend": 1}, "2025-12": {}, "2026-01": {"compare": 1}, "2026-02": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-03": {}, "2026-04": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-05": {}, "2026-06": {}, "2026-07": {}, "2026-08": {}, "2026-09": {"recommend": 5, "neutral": 2}, "2026-10": {}}, "quotes": [{"id": 794779584, "item_id": 49673724, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49673724", "by": "ModernMech", "date": "2026-09-12", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "most of my students (I have taught thousands) report having their first programming experience in Scratch", "excerpt": "> However it was not to the degree where this guy's response was warranted at all. Not one bit. Agreed. > so is the conclusion that Snap is perfect for what it's intended and that there is no room for criticism or opposing views against it? That's going too far in the opposite direction, no one has claimed that at all. Your opening post was \"this is BS and just a toy, it's got no connection to the real world.\" That w", "context": "teacher who has taught thousands of students", "use_case": "teaching kids programming", "switched_from": "", "story": "\u03bb Snap \u2013 An inviting programming language for kids and adults for CS study"}, {"id": 794744208, "item_id": 49671513, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49671513", "by": "ModernMech", "date": "2026-09-12", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Proceeds to make games and stories with graphics, sounds and interaction, which they share with their friends, fully editable and runnable in a web environment with zero setup", "excerpt": "Here's how teaching kids goes without scratch: \"This is python, we use it to do professional development work. Here's VS code, we use it to do professional development work. Let's learn them.\" 6 year olds: \"Okay!\" Proceeds to mangle whitespace, variable names, scope, indexing, ==, forgets :, doesn't understand what def is, even after they get all that the program is basically \"hello world\" print to console. 6 year ol", "context": "teaches kids", "use_case": "teaching kids programming", "switched_from": "", "story": "\u03bb Snap \u2013 An inviting programming language for kids and adults for CS study"}, {"id": 794629760, "item_id": 49664360, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49664360", "by": "aspizu", "date": "2026-09-11", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Scratch is how I first learned programming.", "excerpt": "Scratch is how I first learned programming. I was building increasingly ambitious projects in it, and at some point the editor itself became the main thing I was fighting. Once a project got to around 10,000 blocks, it could get painfully laggy, and I ended up spending a lot of time engineering around Scratch's limits. That is what eventually led me to build goboscript: https://github.com/aspizu/goboscript I'm one of", "context": "software engineer who learned on Scratch", "use_case": "learning programming", "switched_from": "", "story": "\u03bb Snap \u2013 An inviting programming language for kids and adults for CS study"}, {"id": 794604833, "item_id": 49662802, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49662802", "by": "jc4p", "date": "2026-09-11", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I've been spending a lot of time with my nephews working on Scratch and Snap.", "excerpt": "I've been spending a lot of time with my nephews working on Scratch and Snap. They also attend local classes and their teachers switched from Snap to this which is way simpler and stickier with my nephews: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/makecode", "context": "", "use_case": "teaching kids programming", "switched_from": "", "story": "\u03bb Snap \u2013 An inviting programming language for kids and adults for CS study"}, {"id": 792469872, "item_id": 49529367, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49529367", "by": "desertrider12", "date": "2026-09-01", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "scratch was the trigger for me just as you say.", "excerpt": "scratch was the trigger for me just as you say. I was turning 11 when we used it at school (28 now). A year or so later I was reading Java for Dummies and making little tools on the TI-84. Then learning C++ and python on a raspberry pi 1B. I\u2019m grateful to that computer lab teacher who thought scratch was worth teaching.", "context": "", "use_case": "learning programming", "switched_from": "", "story": "Has early Scratch experience led to fulfilling careers?"}, {"id": 792460944, "item_id": 49528809, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49528809", "by": "anon291", "date": "2026-09-01", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use scratch to teach my kids programming.", "excerpt": "You have to have a certain grit to really succeed in STEM. The key lie of the kits is that... it's not easy. If having things be easy is your thing, then this is not something you want to do. And I don't mean 'easy' by 'not requiring work'. There are many easy things that are themselves lucrative careers because they require work that people don't want to do / aren't good at. STEM is 'hard' in the sense that there's ", "context": "parent", "use_case": "teaching kids programming", "switched_from": "", "story": "Has early Scratch experience led to fulfilling careers?"}, {"id": 792276944, "item_id": 49517309, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49517309", "by": "bgoated01", "date": "2026-09-01", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "My kids are learning on Scratch. 10 and 9 years old, been doing it for a few years at this point.", "excerpt": "My kids are learning on Scratch. 10 and 9 years old, been doing it for a few years at this point. The older one has had the opportunity to switch to Python but keeps going back to Scratch. He can make less trivial things than I used to make with Mark Overmars' GameMaker when I was a teen, and I'm now a C++ developer. So it would seem like a high possibility. He's done pathfinding algorithms, raycasting, file loading/", "context": "C++ developer with two kids", "use_case": "kids learning programming", "switched_from": "", "story": "Has early Scratch experience led to fulfilling careers?"}, {"id": 792268656, "item_id": 49516791, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49516791", "by": "outlore", "date": "2026-09-01", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I used scratch in cs50 to make a music platformer. I would say it led me down a career in computing", "excerpt": "I used scratch in cs50 to make a music platformer. I would say it led me down a career in computing", "context": "", "use_case": "learning programming", "switched_from": "", "story": "Has early Scratch experience led to fulfilling careers?"}, {"id": 766853296, "item_id": 47928331, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47928331", "by": "nmilo", "date": "2026-04-27", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I'm sorry because I love the scratch project", "excerpt": "I'm sorry because I love the scratch project but this has to be said: they found XSS in SVGs in a surface with attacker-controlled access to Node and their fix was sanitizing it using regex??? And this was discovered by a user on scratch? Even worse, OP's latest post \"Every version of Scratch is vulnerable to arbitrary code execution\" just tells you how exactly to exploit something similar today in the current versio", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "The Woes of Sanitizing SVGs"}, {"id": 753967537, "item_id": 47122971, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47122971", "by": "techteach00", "date": "2026-02-23", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Grades 3-5 use Scratch.", "excerpt": "Thank you for the suggestions. I think I realize the problem after reading many of the posts. What's slowing these devices down is the management software running over them. GoGuardian and whatever else IT has on them. We also aren't allowed to use an ad blocker anymore. I used to have Ublock installed on all the devices before GoGuardian prevented it. It's a really depressing situation that I imagine will only get w", "context": "K-8 teacher", "use_case": "teaching kids coding", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Chromebook Leads for K-8 School In Need?"}, {"id": 745343025, "item_id": 46583939, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46583939", "by": "njoyablpnting", "date": "2026-01-11", "stance": "compare", "quote": "Scratch abstracts away a ton of stuff to allow the student to focus on logical building blocks", "excerpt": "This is super cool! Would love to see how you hooked up Ruff and ty. Just curious, why not use Pygame? Scratch abstracts away a ton of stuff to allow the student to focus on logical building blocks that mirror the mental model one might have when writing a real program. I'm wondering if keeping a lot of those abstractions when transitioning to text programming is educationally useful? For example, it might not be cle", "context": "teaches beginners", "use_case": "teaching programming", "switched_from": "", "story": "Moving Scratch generation to Python on browser"}, {"id": 733838016, "item_id": 45864876, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45864876", "by": "d3Xt3r", "date": "2025-11-09", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I would recommend installing Scratch[1] - it's a programming language designed for kids from 8yrs old onwards.", "excerpt": "I would recommend installing Scratch[1] - it's a programming language designed for kids from 8yrs old onwards. I would recommend pairing it with a Raspberry Pi, as you can do fun real-world physical stuff with using Scratch, and I think kids can find that very interesting. Eg, start with a simple program to turn LED lights on and off, programming buttons, playing sounds etc. Eventually this could lead to making simpl", "context": "", "use_case": "teaching kids programming", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: How would you set up a child\u2019s first Linux computer?"}]}