Features/Scratch

Scratch for Fedora

Summary

Scratch is an educational programming environment which makes it easy to create games, animations, and art. It's open source and would be a great addition to Fedora.

Owner

• Name: Matthew Miller
• Email: mattdm at fedoraproject dot org

Current status

• Targeted release: Fedora 19
• Last updated: 2013-03-11
• Percentage of completion: 95%

I want to withdraw the Scratch feature as a feature, for two reasons:

- while it works on 64-bit systems, the Squeak plugins are not 64-bit clean, and upstream isn't interested in resolution. - Scratch 2.0 was just released with great fanfare, and that based on proprietary Adobe Flash. Hopefully a future version will be open-source friendly again. The current version isn't yet dead, but heavy promotion seems untimely.

The package as it is is in F19, though, so people can use it, and I do intend to work on the 64-bit issues as I have time.

Detailed Description

Read more about Scratch at http://scratch.mit.edu. Previous versions were not open source, but this one is. We've also worked with upstream to resolve issues around licensing and proprietary media formats.

Benefit to Fedora

Scratch is great for kids, and for creators of all ages. Its inclusion will help promote Fedora as a "maker" distribution.

Scope

We're largely done: the package is in the last stages of review, and issues around mp3s and licensing complications have been resolved. Additionally, the Squeak VM (which Scratch runs on) has been updated to the latest version, fixing a number of problems.

A few bugs remain in the current package, including an issue with full screen mode and a crash when using the camera. These should be resolved before the program is presented as a feature.

How To Test

Run Scratch. Download demo code from http://scratch.mit.edu and observe that it works.

It's expected that most testers will be interested in the Scratch language; writing programs and trying features are good tests.

User Experience

Scratch will be available.

Dependencies

Nothing depends on Scratch, but Scratch depends on Squeak VM. Some of the bugs may need to be fixed there rather than in Scratch.

Contingency Plan

I'd like to see Scratch through the review process in any case. The most likely contingency is that it's packaged but still has bugs, in which case we'll leave it available but document those bugs. In the worst case, we just don't ship it.

Documentation

There is a wealth of documentation at http://scratch.mit.edu/

There is also a popular new book from No Starch Press, Super Scratch Programming Adventure! (http://nostarch.com/scratch)

Mitch Resnick TEDx talk on learning with Scratch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42_30Rgf6F0

Release Notes

Fedora 19 includes Scratch, the graphical programming environment from the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab. Scratch makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, games, animations, music, and art.

Install Scratch with

 yum install scratch

and run either from your desktop's application menu (under Programming) or by typing scratch in a terminal window.

Comments and Discussion

• See Talk:Features/Scratch