What is Scratch?
Scratch is a visual programming language. It uses blocks rather than pure text. Those blocks are effectively pre-built procedures.
To write a program you connect blocks together and tailor them to do what you need.
Scratch is ideal for making simple 2D games, quizzes and animation, but is actually quite powerful and can be used to show complex computer science ideas.
Scratch is a project of the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab. It is provided free of charge. You can find it here. We use a version that can be downloaded onto PCs but the latest version is the online one.
Scratch uses objects called Sprites and a stage. Each object can be programmed.
These pages will introduce you to some of the simple code you can use to make Scratch programs.
It only really covers the skills you might use in your school work - if you want more after working your way through these, the scratch web site is a great starting place.