"The MIT Media Laboratory and UCLA propose to develop and study a new networked, media-rich programming environment, designed specifically to enhance the development of technological fluency at after-school centers in economically-disadvantaged communities."
(community technology centers)
The research team had worked on “programmable bricks” which had been commercialized as LEGO MindStorms, used by millions of youth around the world.
Then Members of the research team co-founded the Computer Clubhouse project, a network of after-school learning centers for youth from economically-disadvantaged communities.
Scratch 1.x was implemented in Squeak Smalltalk. A follow up version of version 1.4 with many performance improvements and rewritten to be Cog compatible s available for Squeak under the name NuScratch. It was funded by the Raspberry Pi Foundation in order that Scratch would be practical on the incredible, cheap, ultra-cool Raspberry Pi SBC. More
Scratch 2
The second version of Scratch from MIT was a rewrite in Flash. This is the version which in use at a large scale currently. Going for Flash was a move from a completely open development system to proprietary system. To further complicate things, Adobe has end-of-lifed Flash and so a further rewrite had to be done. You can find out about this at http://scratch.mit.edu
Scratch 3
Scratch 3 is a rewrite in JavaScript. It is based on a library called 'Scratch Blocks' which is used for other similar applications as well.
More https://scratch.mit.edu/developers
Some other versions & useful websites
A version ScratchJr for children between 5 and 7 is available for iPad and Android.
