Creative Learning: What We Share, We Receive!
By: Samantha Fiori, MSW, Senior Philanthropy Officer
This Giving Tuesday, our team reflects on our privilege at the Scratch Foundation to share Scratch creative learning products, programs, and educator resources with Scratchers worldwide. In 2023, we’ve seen more Scratchers than ever using our Scratch products to make art, build virtual games, and share ideas… all through creative learning.
This year, more than 23 million new Scratch accounts were created. Those accounts tell the story of millions of block-based brilliance and creative coding moments. They celebrate the classrooms, libraries, and living rooms where curious minds imagined worlds, tested new ideas and learned from their peers across the Scratch global user community. While busy at play and learning, Scratch users were immersed in a digital citizenship training space where they developed their digital voice, focused and encouraged by our tireless moderation team and guided by the Scratch Community Guidelines.
These accounts also celebrate the incredible educators — both in the classroom and out — who are fiercely dedicated to equitable creative coding and harnessing the power of creative learning in their facilitation of computer science, math, language arts, history, and beyond. Scratch educators find and often improve our free, equitable, creative coding resources and join our educator communities of practice. They learn from their peers, share new ideas, and make the Scratch experience more meaningful for all of us.
Scratch educators inspire us with their tenacity, technical expertise, and commitment to learning.
In this blog, we’ll look back at 2023 to honor all the children and educators as they tinkered, created, and grew in computational confidence.
Learning with Young People
An essential aspect of any community’s identity is the traditions it keeps.
In 2023, the Scratch Foundation’s annual traditions of Scratch Day, Scratch Week, and Scratch Camp were celebrated with creative learning prompts, shared project studios, coding music to play throughout a new game, and telling the stories most important to the Scratcher behind the code.
These are annual traditions held dear by many of the 73 million active Scratch users. These moments set the stage to help Scratchers make connections, learn new things, and develop new ways of expressing themselves.
At our Scratch Day kick-off in Cambridge, Massachusetts, last May, we spent the day with hundreds of children and families tinkering with code, pipe cleaners, legos, and so much more. Later, the Scratch Day facilitation guides we created helped local organizations host more than 500 remixed events worldwide. We can’t stop thinking about each event’s big questions, creativity, and fun!
Scratch Week, the annual celebration of Scratch’s birthday, prompted users to create projects from the ideas of “Journey Around the World,” “Paper Crafts,” “Opposites,” “Pet Cafe,” and “Birthday Carnival.” Each prompt was accompanied by a helpful learning guide translated into Spanish, Japanese, Hindi, and Brazilian Portuguese. Scratchers worldwide shared over 3,200 projects as part of Scratch Week and engaged with others’ projects through nearly 20,000 comments within Scratch Week Studios.
Scratch Camp thrilled Scratchers with the theme of “Space, Stars and Beyond.” Campers created more than 14,000 projects in 53 languages. There were almost 49,000 comments on Scratch Camp studios.
Thank you, Scratch community, for all the fun we had this year learning alongside you!
Learning with Educators
Despite the successes of the Scratch global community, creative coding is still out of reach for many children worldwide. This is where we look to and learn alongside Scratch educators to help us close that access gap.
Through our annual Scratch Conference and educator communities of practice like the Scratch Education Collaborative (SEC) and Scratch Educator Meetups, we helped educators develop their confidence with creative computing through fun, collaborative learning experiences.
This year, through the SEC, educators from more than 170 organizations from more than 20 countries incorporated equitable, creative coding resources and strategies into their instruction, impacting more than 1.5 million children. Our team is endlessly grateful for our SEC partners and their expertise in designing, improving, and developing Scratch products and learning guides tailored to their communities.
“[Scratch] is a very good way to introduce students to programming because it really captures quite a lot of [the students’] attention. Someone wants to do digital storytelling, someone else wants to do game development: all of this can be done using Scratch in a way that is quite interactive and very simple … It gives you the opportunity to be very creative and playful.” — Afandi Indiatsi, Scratch Educator, STEAMLabs Africa
We relaunched the Scratch Educator Meetups initiative in 2023. These educator-led professional development groups gather educators with shared geography to better leverage Scratch in their learning environments. This model started in 2014 with one group in Massachusetts and has grown to 28 groups worldwide with more than 3,200 members.
Scratch educators help our team realize our vision to spread creative, caring, collaborative, equitable approaches to coding and learning around the world.
Looking Forward to 2024
The Scratch Foundation has much to be grateful for, especially the young people and educators who make the Scratch worldwide movement more fun daily!
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To support all the learning that happens with Scratch products, please consider donating to the Scratch Foundation. The Scratch Foundation is a “Four-Star Charity ‘’ on CharityNavigator with a 97% confidence score respective to administration and financial management. It is one of 5% of all nonprofits in the United States (US) with a transparency rating on Guidestar. It has been awarded the Silver level of transparency in recognition of brand and programmatic details.
