Grantee Profile: Scratch Foundation

Scratch is the world’s largest free coding platform for children — it helps young people use coding tools to create their own interactive media projects and share them in an active online community. The Scratch Foundation works to ensure that the Scratch platform remains free, open, and accessible to as many children around the world as possible.

The foundation’s mission is to “support approaches to coding that engage young people in thinking creatively, reasoning systematically, and working collaboratively,” which they achieve by fundraising to support all areas of the Scratch community, organizing events, and sharing information on Scratch’s impact with the public.

SFE has been a major supporter of the Scratch Foundation since the organization’s founding in 2013 — and the relationship has worked solidly in both directions. Their research-based approach to developing the platform has been instrumental in informing SFE’s approach to Computational Thinking, and SFE’s work with the Scratch Foundation has played a significant role in ensuring that the Scratch platform reaches as many kids as it can.

Over the last 10 years, Scratch has made a huge impact for millions of children around the world. Scratch has grown to accommodate 100 million unique visitors per year, and is growing by 20,000 new users every day on average. In that same window of time, Scratch users have shared more than 19 million projects — and that’s only a fraction of the total number of projects created on the platform. The Scratch community is also enormously diverse, with users from 140 countries who speak more than 60 languages. As an online community and an educational tool, Scratch is nearly unparalleled in its ability to connect young people and unite them through coding and creative expression.