The Scratch online community expands opportunities for children and teens to express themselves creatively with digital technologies, enabling them to create their own interactive stories, games and animations - then share their creations with one another on the web.

For many children and teens, the web is primarily a place for browsing, clicking and chatting. In the Scratch online community, children shift from media consumers to media producers, learning to design, create and share interactive media.

The Lifelong Kindergarten research group at the MIT Media Lab has been developing Scratch since 2003, with primary funding from the US National Science Foundation. The software and accompanying website were publicly launched in May 2007. Since then, more than a million people have visited the Scratch website, more than 200,000 people have downloaded Scratch software, and more than 100,000 projects have been uploaded to the website.

The Scratch website has been called the "You-Tube of interactive media". Young people (primarily ages 8 to 17, with a peak at age 12) have created and shared an incredibly diverse range of interactive projects, including online newscasts, multi-episode stories, science simulations and community service announcements. All Scratch software and services are available free of charge.

The name Scratch comes from the technique used by hip-hop disc jockeys, who spin vinyl records to mix music clips together in creative ways. Similarly, Scratch lets children mix together a wide variety of media: graphics, photos, music and sounds.

To bring their multimedia projects to life, children snap together graphical programming blocks, each representing an instruction or action (for example: moving an object, changing its color, or playing a sound clip). Creating a Scratch program is as easy as building with Lego bricks, without any of the obscure syntax of traditional programming languages. Children can upload their Scratch projects to the shared website, where other members of the community can try out the projects, provide comments and suggestions and download the original source code to examine or modify the project.

As children create and share Scratch projects, they learn to think creatively, analyze systematically and work collaboratively - important 21 century learning skills.

The Scratch website and software are developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten at the MIT Media Lab. The core team includes Mitchel Resnick, John Maloney, Andres Monroy-Hernandez, Natalie Rusk, Evelyn Eastmond, Amon Millner, Jay Silver, Eric Rosenbaum, Karen Brennan, Han Xu, Brian Silverman, Tammy Stern, Ubong Ukoh, Lis Sylvan and Kemie Guaida. The team works in an interactive, iterative, loosely organized style, with each team member contributing to many different parts of the project. The group has collaborated closely with Yasmin Kafai, Kylie Peppler, Grace Chiu and others at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies.