Scratch is probably familiar to parents in China. Scratch is a simple graphical programming tool developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The development team of this software is called the "Lifelong Kindergarten Group". Almost all children will like this software at a glance and establish a desire to do programming. Nearly 60 million children around the world use Scratch's visual programming language to make games, animations, stories, etc., including Chinese students. Chinese parents all hope to transform their 200 million children into world-class technical talents, and they are eager to learn programming languages as soon as possible. According to the latest statistics, 5.65% of Scratch's registered users, or about 3 million, are from China, but the coverage is actually larger than this number because many Chinese developers have built derivative products based on the open source software Scratch.
However, it was recently discovered that Chinese Scratcher could no longer access Scratch's website. The website Greatfire.org, an organization that monitors Internet censorship, showed that the website had been 100% blocked as early as August 20, while Scratcher marked it on August 14. The ban. An official news media reported on August 21 that Projects and SStudio on Scratch contained "many false and defamatory content about China. The article added, "The distribution of any service information in China must comply with local regulations." Scratch's website and users The forum has been closed in China. The Scratch editor can use the encoder in every country/region in the world, and is available in more than 50 languages, which can be downloaded and used offline. This means that Chinese users who have installed the software can continue to use it temporarily It is not clear whether this restriction will expand and hinder future version updates of the software.
Scratch is now widely used by student users in China. It has been used in many official information technology textbooks for elementary school students in many large city schools. There are many coding competitions for children who use Scratch. Platforms like Scratch have a large number of young Chinese users. This is actually the reason why the platform must exercise self-discipline and must not allow things that hurt the feelings of the Chinese people. At present, the Scratch Team has not issued a statement on this. If it proves to be permanent, it will prohibit the implementation of the ban in China, which may increase support for local alternatives.