Program explainer
What is Scratch?
A programming language where the instructions are blocks you snap together and read like sentences. Tap blocks to build a program, then press the flag and watch it run.
Build a program
Tap a block to add it
Your program — tap a block to remove
The stage
The blocks run top to bottom, in the order they are stacked — you can read the program out loud and know exactly what will happen. A block only snaps where it makes sense, so a seven-year-old never loses an afternoon to a missing bracket.
What they'll actually make
Computer skills first
For the youngest students the program starts before code: mouse and keyboard control, saving and finding files, and joining a lesson online without a parent sitting next to them.
Projects that run
An interactive "All About Me", then animations, then complete games with scores, levels, and a way to win or lose — built from an empty project each time.
Published and presented
Projects publish to the Scratch community with a shareable link, and students present their work to the class — explaining what they built and what went wrong on the way.
An ocean game where you collect rubbish to protect marine life. They entered it in the Australian STEM Video Game Challenge 2026.
Why choose this program
They can read their own program
Every block is labelled in plain words. A child can point at the stack and tell you what the computer is about to do — which is most of what "understanding programming" means at this age.
No syntax to fight
Blocks only fit where they make sense, so mistakes are mistakes in thinking, not typing. Your child debugs logic instead of hunting for a missing semicolon.
It starts before coding
Level 1 covers computer literacy — files, keyboard, and independent online learning. For many families that half is immediately useful at school, whatever happens next.
The concepts transfer
Sequence, loops, conditions, variables and events are the same ideas in GDevelop, Roblox and Python. Scratch teaches them first; later programs just remove the blocks.
The tool: Scratch — free, made by MIT, and it runs in a browser with nothing to install.