When was Scratch made?
Who made Scratch, and where?
Scratch was created by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, led by Mitchel Resnick. The team built it as a research project into how children learn by making things, and it's still run from MIT today alongside the non-profit Scratch Foundation.
It has been free from the start, and the code is open source, which is why offline editors and independent mirrors exist alongside the official version.
Version history
Scratch 1.0, released May 15, 2007. Desktop-only downloadable software, written in Squeak. MIT made it free and open to anyone.
Scratch 2.0, released May 9, 2013. Moved the editor into the browser using Flash, and added the online community where kids could share and remix each other's projects.
Scratch 3.0, released January 2, 2019. A complete rebuild in HTML5 and JavaScript, dropping the Flash dependency. This is the current version. It works on tablets, Chromebooks, and any modern browser, and added an offline editor alongside it.
Why the version matters for your kid
If your kid is using Scratch today, they're on 3.0. Any tutorials or YouTube guides made before 2019 show an older interface. The logic is the same, but the buttons look different. Stick to guides from 2019 onward to avoid confusion.
