Scratch: public the moment you share

Scratch is a block-based programming environment for making games, animations and interactive stories in a browser. It was developed at the MIT Media Lab in 2007 by a team led by Professor Mitchel Resnick, and in 2019 it moved to the Scratch Foundation, the independent nonprofit that now develops and moderates it. The current generation is Scratch 3.0.

The tool hub holds every entry to the same six criteria and refuses to turn them into a score. Scratch shows why: excellent on cost and languages, awkward on classroom control, genuinely unusual on licensing. One number would hide all three.

• Age Designed for 8 to 16; ScratchJr covers ages 5 to 7
• Cost Free, no paid tier, nonprofit behind it
• Licence Editor source AGPLv3; scratch-blocks Apache 2.0; name and logo not licensed
• Offline Scratch app for Windows 10+, macOS 10.13+, ChromeOS, Android 6.0+ tablets. No Linux
• Children's data No account needed to work; student accounts need no pupil email; Google Analytics on the site
• Languages 74 interface locales including German; community content untranslated

What an account is actually for

This decides whether a teacher can use Scratch with a class at all. The browser editor opens and runs with nobody logged in: Scratch's download FAQ says you can "use the Scratch project editor in most web browsers on most devices". The privacy policy is clear about the other side, that an account is needed "to share projects, create studios, or post comments". In the editor's published source, the File entries "Save to your computer" and "Load from your computer" sit outside the login check, while "Save now" sits inside it. So twenty-five pupils can code for a full period with no accounts at all, provided they save project files to the device and load them back next week.

The licence is two licences

The terms state that the source code for the Scratch and ScratchJr editors "is available for download and subject to the GNU Affero General Public License Version 3". The repositories match: scratch-editor, scratch-desktop, scratch-www and scratch-l10n are AGPL-3.0, while scratch-blocks is Apache-2.0. That licence file was changed by a commit titled "docs: switch to AGPLv3" dated 26 September 2024, which matters because much of what is written about Scratch predates it and names something else.

The name is a separate question, and the terms say so outright: "the AGPLv3 does not apply to Scratch Materials or Scratch Team Marks." The Scratch Cat, the logo and the ScratchJr name may be used only "for your personal, educational, and non-commercial purposes in direct connection with your use of the Service". Fine for a school, not for a paid holiday camp that wants the word Scratch on its flyer.

Offline works, with gaps Scratch names itself

The download page lists the Scratch app for Windows 10+, macOS 10.13+, ChromeOS and Android 6.0+. The same page says it is not supported on Linux, and that "the current version of Scratch for Android only works on tablets", not phones. Sharing from inside the app is not supported: you export the project and upload it on the website. Hardware extensions work in the app without Scratch Link, but Scratch Link itself needs an internet connection, and on managed devices updates are an administrator's job.

Children's data, and what "shared" means

The privacy policy, last updated 27 March 2026, says registration asks for a username, password, country, gender and email address, and that other users see only username and country. The teacher FAQ adds birth month and year. Registration also has a parental-permission path, explained on screen as needed "because of child protection and privacy laws in your area"; we did not test which countries trigger it. The page for parents says Scratch does not "sell or rent account information to anyone". The cookie policy lists essential, functional and performance cookies with no advertising category, but the performance cookies are Google Analytics, and Google Tag Manager loads on the pages we fetched.

Sharing is misread in both directions. A project stays private until the child presses Share: the editor tells them an unshared project is one "only you can see", and that sharing will "let everyone see it". Everyone then means everyone, and the community guidelines add that sharing gives every other user permission to remix the work. Deleting an account hides personal information from public view but, the policy says, does not remove all of it from the servers.

Twenty-five pupils on a school network

Being browser first, Scratch inherits the whole dependency chain set out inthe school network reality: bandwidth for a class connecting at once, a filtering policy that lets the editor load but blocks what it fetches, device management, and a route into whatever already holds the grades. Scratch confirms the last one is missing, its teacher FAQ stating that "Scratch does not connect with any classroom management services", naming Google Classroom and Clever. That is the gap the Spanish pilot's teacher dashboard lost marks for, in a different tool a decade later.

Three further limits belong in that conversation. A Teacher Account is requested through a form, with the details used "to verify the account creator is an educator", so plan for a wait. A class caps at 150 students. And a class cannot be private: "All content shared within your class will be accessible to the Scratch community." Commenting cannot be turned off for a class either, and Scratch's own suggested workaround is the offline app, which contains no community. Our judgement rather than their documentation: if the network is your risk, run the first term on the app.

For a parent

Worth a child's time, on what it is rather than what it promises: free, no upsell, a nonprofit behind it, and a block language that transfers to other tools. The reverse case is in ourCatrobat review: Scratch is built around a desktop workflow, so if the only screen in your house is a phone, Pocket Code is the better choice.

On the public side, be plain with yourself. This is a public internet community, and the Foundation's own site says children have created over a billion projects on it. Moderation is real rather than decorative: a report button, a staffed team, a profanity filter, and guidelines telling children not to post last names, addresses or school names. If that is not where you are yet, the app gives you the making without the audience.

Where this meets the history of this domain

The published evaluation of Create@School, the school edition built in the No One Left Behind project, describes Pocket Code as inspired by MIT's Scratch. The two are siblings rather than rivals: the same snapping together of labelled blocks, a different machine underneath.Pocket Code put the environment in the child's hand, Scratch kept it in the browser and built a community around it. Terms are explained in theglossary.

What we have not tested

We have not run Scratch with a class. No usability testing, no timed benchmarks, no security audit, no measurement on twenty-five machines sharing one access point. This entry is built from Scratch's own documentation, terms, policies and public repositories, plus one sourced sentence from the Create@School evaluation, not from a classroom trial of ours. We have also not audited translation quality across the 74 locales.