Next, you'll take those skills and create a simple animation to understand how Scratch can make simple tasks easier and be incorporated into other projects.

There are all sorts of sounds you could add to your Scratch project. Give your project that extra oomph by adding sounds.

YEARS: 3–4, 5–6 Looking for a simple project to get you started in Scratch? Add characters, animate them, create and share your own interactive Holiday Card. Acknowledgements ...

A Rutgers University project aims to make those sorts of automations easy for anyone to add to their household appliances, with a little help the graphical programming language Scratch.

That doesn't surprise Karen Brennan, a Scratch project leader at MIT's Media Lab, where Scratch was developed. "Our agenda isn't to create armies of programmers," Brennan says.