Is the Scratch Programming Environment Ideal for all? Enhancements to the Scratch IDE to Make it Easier to Use and More Useful for Students and Teachers

Abstract

Even the most successful programming environment for beginners, Scratch, when compared to other block-based IDEs, is not always the ideal tool for everyone. Scratch Team’s development policy -creating a single environment for all users where no customization is allowed- makes Scratch a great environment for most users to start with computer programming, but not the ideal environment for those users that -thanks to Scratch’s outstanding features- want to use it to create complex projects, or for teachers that use it for their lessons. In this paper we will highlight the weaknesses of Scratch for expert developers and for teachers. We will then look at other popular block-languages and tools to find which weaknesses they can help to solve. Finally, we will propose some new enhancements, that are still not available in Scratch and in the tools we analysed.