Celebrating CSEdWeek 2016 on Scratch
By My Nguyen
Every year, the Scratch Team gears up for Computer Science Education Week — a time when we welcome millions of new people to the Scratch community. Historically, CSEdWeek is one of the highest-traffic times of the year for Scratch, and 2016 was no exception. More than 5 million people from around the world visited the online community during CSEdWeek, creating more than 1.3 million new projects about a wide range of topics including Christmas tunes, mythical creatures, and, of course, bottle flipping.
Across the Scratch online community, Scratchers favorited more than 460,000 projects and showed “love” to more than 240,000 projects. Scratchers also drew inspiration from each other and remixed more than 180,000 projects. Collectively, they clocked in more than 1.4 million hours (that’s the same amount of time it would take the planet Neptune to orbit around the sun once!) creating, remixing, and sharing on Scratch.
Newcomers and Scratchers alike created projects using tutorials found on the newly-launched Things to Try page, which offers a variety of ways to get started with Scratch through interest-based activities. Some chose to animate their names, while others defied gravity with Scratch. Some tinkered with sounds and audio to create musical projects.
Scratchers also participated in the Design Your Own Character studio — a special collaboration between Cartoon Network and the Scratch Team — adding nearly 400 projects featuring their own original characters.
Members of the Scratch community shared their CSEdWeek celebrations with us on social media, mentioning @Scratch on Twitter over 1700 times over the course of the week!
Thank you, Scratch community, for making Computer Science Education Week colorful, humorous, melodious, and memorable.
Scratch on!
My Nguyen is Communications Specialist for the Scratch Foundation.
