Scratch is a programming language that is based on visual blocks. Kids can drag and drop code blocks and join them together to create and share interactive media such as stories, mini-games, and animations. Scratch is also an online community and kids can share their creation with people from all over the world.

As kids create with Scratch, they learn to think creatively, work collaboratively, and reason systematically, which are all essential 21st century skills they must inculcate. Scratch is developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab. See http://scratch.mit.edu.

Scratch is an ideal programming language for kids to create and share interactive media such as stories, games, and animations. Scratch helps kids express their creativity, work collaboratively and think systematically in order to solve problems in code.

Besides the ease of learning a programming language, Scratch is also an active online community of kids all around the world learning and creating programs. Projects created are shared publicly, and aspiring coders can browse other student’s projects, view the code behind and even modify other student’s code.

Developments in the fields of Artificial Intelligence, Mobile Connectivity, Big Data, and the Internet of Things, have raised the collective capabilities of these technologies and combined them into networked services that would soon render a number our current skill-sets obsolete. It used to be thought that computers and machines will only be able to replace jobs which are repetitive in nature, however, it is estimated that 40-60% of jobs will soon be replaceable by computers.

The ability to understand and write computer programmess will empower your kid with the skills to navigate, understand and perhaps create this computational future. In whichever profession that your kid may enter in the future, it is certain that programming and logical thinking skills would be a key part of it.