Scratch computer programming language could be extended for the under-8s

Ten years ago, a computer programming language called Scratch emerged from the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Using stackable icons to represent the sequencing and logic of computer code, Scratch was designed to make programming easy for children aged eight and over. Today the free program is used in more than 150 countries and thousands of schools, with more than 1,500 animations and games uploaded to the online Scratch community each day.

But who says that eight is the youngest age at which you can teach children how to program? Now there is Scratch Junior for children still learning to read and tie their shoes.

Designed for children in kindergarten through to Primary Two, Scratch Junior is not yet available to the public, although its founders are preparing for an iPad version in 2014.

This school year, they are evaluating how it works in a handful of classrooms in the US state of Massachusetts. The project is led by Marina Umaschi Bers, a professor in the department of child development at Tufts University, and Mitchel Resnick, Scratch's founder at the MIT Media Lab.

Last year, kindergarten pupils at Boston's Jewish Community Day School used Scratch Junior once a week to display collages and play animations about what they learned. In one case, they created an online project about the biblical plague of the locusts, programming computers to show the insects landing on a tree's leafy branches, which suddenly went bare.