Is the Scratch Programming Environment Ideal for all?

Enhancements to the Scratch IDE to Make it Easier to Use and More

Useful for Students and Teachers

Stefano Federici

, Elisabetta Gola

and Elisabetta Sergi

University of Cagliari, via Is Mirrionis, 1, Cagliari, Italy

Keywords: Scratch, Integrated Development Environment, Block-Based Programming, Scratchaddons, Snap, Dyslexia.

Abstract: Even the most successful programming environment for beginners, Scratch, when compared to other block-

based IDEs, is not always the ideal tool for everyone. Scratch Team’s development policy -creating a single

environment for all users where no customization is allowed- makes Scratch a great environment for most

users to start with computer programming, but not the ideal environment for those users that -thanks to

Scratch’s outstanding features- want to use it to create complex projects, or for teachers that use it for their

lessons. In this paper we will highlight the weaknesses of Scratch for expert developers and for teachers. We

will then look at other popular block-languages and tools to find which weaknesses they can help to solve.

Finally, we will propose some new enhancements, that are still not available in Scratch and in the tools we

analysed.

1 INTRODUCTION

Scratch 1, whose public release dates back to 2007,

has evolved very slowly since then, especially when

we look at it as a programming language. Comparing

Scratch 1.3 -the first public release that could handle

string and list variables other than numbers- to

Scratch the last stable release 3.0, very little has

changed in the Scratch language or IDE (Integrated

Development Environment). Every advancement is

carefully planned by the Scratch Team, the main goal

remaining to keep Scratch always completely

unambiguous and easy to use even by “younger users

[…] focus[ing] on self-directed learning” (Maloney et

al., 2010). These goals have generated an absolute

absence of possibility of customization: everything

must be always visible, and, more importantly, all

users must share the same experience (Figure 1). All

users will see the block palette (1), the coding area

(2), the Stage (3), and the sprite area (4).

So, even users with specific needs, like advanced

users, or teachers, or students with Learning

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8506-1360

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0966-9520

https://orcid.org/0009-0009-7795-5861

http://scratch.mit.edu

Figure 1: The “Breakout” project in the standard Scratch

IDE. The main areas are the block palette (1), the coding

area (2), the Stage (3), and the sprite area (4).

Disorders (LDs) can’t do much except enabling a

larger or a smaller Stage (area 3 at the top right of

Figure 1) in the IDE, so to get a somewhat larger

coding area (area 1 in Figure 1). Only a few of the

scripts composed by colourful blocks are visible in

the central area. All users must stick to the Scratch

IDE as it is.

Federici, S., Gola, E. and Sergi, E.

Is the Scratch Programming Environment Ideal for all? Enhancements to the Scratch IDE to Make it Easier to Use and More Useful for Students and Teachers.

DOI: 10.5220/0011838200003470

In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU 2023) - Volume 1, pages 171-181

ISBN: 978-989-758-641-5; ISSN: 2184-5026

 2023 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. Under CC license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

171

Even if there are alternatives to using Scratch

online (Federici et al., 2022), every month the Scratch

website is visited by more than 30 million visitors and

about 2 million projects are created online

Being the usage of the Scratch online editor so

widespread, in this paper we are going to first explore

the addon tools that are already available and that

allow to modify the Scratch code editor “on the fly”

directly on the website by giving more power to all

users, whether they are students or teachers (Figure

2).

Figure 2: The “breakout” project in the Scratch IDE

enhanced by the Scratch addons, where all scripts of the

selected object are visible in the coding area.

As not everything can be done by using these

addons, we will also explore powerful instruments

available as alternatives to Scratch, and we will also

propose new instruments that should be available for

particular categories of students and teachers.

This study is the outcome of having used Scratch

as an introductory tool to computer programming in

three Computer Science courses of the degree in

Communication Studies of the University of Cagliari

from 2008 to 2022. Most of the proposed

enhancements come also from using Scratch as an

introductory tool to computer programming for k-3 to

k-5 students and their teachers from 2014 to 2020

(Federici et al., 2015, 2018, 2019).

In the following sections we are going to revise

the evolution of Scratch, from Scratch 1 to Scratch 2

and from Scratch 2 to Scratch 3, highlighting why the

new features and modifications have not always been

ideal for students and teachers. Then we will describe

2 interesting tools (an enhanced clone of Scratch and

a set of addons that can be added to the Scratch online

tool) and will analyse their features with respect to the

way they impact on the users. Finally, we propose two

addons that could potentially be really useful for users

with learning disabilities.

https://scratch.mit.edu/statistics/

These blocks are now available in the Scratch 3 Music

extension

2 SCRATCH AS A VERY STABLE

AND FULLY LOCKED

PROGRAMMING IDE

Starting from 2007, very little has changed in the

Scratch editor/language. Furthermore, not all changes

added something. Some of them made the IDE

simpler but poorer in some respect. Every change has

always been imposed to all users that wanted to use

the new features available in the new version, even

those users that, for very good reasons, needed some

of the features that were available only in the older

version(s).

2.1 The Evolution of the Scratch IDE

The main changes that have impacted on previous

users are the following:

 Scratch 2.0 (2013):

o the Java Scratch editor is reimplemented

using Adobe Flash Player, so that users can

now create Scratch projects online (2013)

and can benefit of a faster project

execution; as a downside, the quality of the

sound of the MIDI instruments produced

by the blocks in the Sound category

was

critically reduced, due to Flash's smaller

sound library

;

o users can now create their own command

blocks, that is their procedures;

o the Stage is moved to the left-hand-side of

the IDE;

o the “FOREVER IF” block, whose purpose

was to trigger an action every time that

something happened, is removed. The

reason is that some novice users felt that

the way it worked was ambiguous

. Since

then, users must use two blocks to get the

same result, namely “FOREVER” and

“IF”. Using two blocks instead of one is

felt as unnatural by users that are learning

Scratch for the first time.

o the project cannot be run anymore step-by-

step

 Scratch 3.0 (2019):

o Scratch editor is reimplemented in

JavaScript, due to the Flash Player being

discontinued by Adobe for security

reasons;

https://en.scratch-wiki.info/wiki/Sound_Blocks

https://scratch.mit.edu/discuss/topic/343602/

CSEDU 2023 - 15th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

172

o the Stage is moved back to the right of the

IDE, as this arrangement is felt more

intuitive and understandable

;

o the Scratch blocks are made thicker, so to

allow both new users and touch device

users to drag them more easily

;

o the Pen category and Sound blocks related

to notes and musical instruments are

moved to the extensions.

All these changes cannot be reverted by the user,

they must use the tool “as is” or totally reject it.

2.2 The Drawbacks of the Evolution

Strategy of the Scratch IDE

The evolution strategy of the Scratch IDE followed

by the Scratch Team has drawbacks both as for the

changes they decide to apply and for the changes they

decide to reject

or that they don’t feel as important

for their goals.

2.2.1 Changes Applied Without Appeal

As the IDE cannot be customised, every change had

some drawback for a part of the Scratch users or

teachers. When Scratch 2 appeared:

 if a music teacher or a user had created high

quality music projects in Scratch 1, these projects

became lower quality MIDI music when loaded

in Scratch 2;

 If a user was used to the FOREVER IF block,

they will have to discover by themselves that this

block must be replaced by an IF block embedded

in a FOREVER block, or they will have to ask

for help in the Scratch Forum and hope that they

will quickly find an answer

 If a class was used to the Scratch 1 IDE style,

their teachers will have to keep using the old

Scratch 1 version if they didn’t want to risk

confusing their students with a Stage placed at

the opposite side.

 Many very useful features, especially when

teaching to very young students, are gone forever

(they are missing in Scratch 3 too). Among them:

o the possibility to highlight the blocks

currently executed and to run the project

more slowly in order to better understand the

program flow;

https://scratch.mit.edu/discuss/topic/300543/

https://scratch.mit.edu/faq

https://scratch.mit.edu/discuss/topic/343602/

https://scratch.mit.edu/discuss/1/

o the possibility to ‘shoot pictures’ of the -

partial or total- Stage content to create either

new sprites or new sprite costumes on the fly

(useful for example to create “sensible

zones” on a sprite, or to avoid using the paint

editor to cut off parts of the imported

images);

o sprites cannot be visually rotated/resized

directly on the Stage;

o buttons above the Stage (to

cut/copy/duplicate sprites, blocks, costumes,

and sounds), and contextual menus for items

on the Stage are gone forever.

If a user or a teacher had started using Scratch 2

with their students, when Scratch 3 appeared:

 if they were used to create fairly long scripts

when necessary, now the thicker blocks force

them to scroll a lot to show all the blocks in the

coding area to their students. The new possibility

to zoom out the coding area is not a solution, as

the text of the blocks gets quickly unreadable;

 if an art or a music teacher, or a user used a lot

the Pen and Music blocks to create drawings on

the Stage or to create music, they will have to ask

their students to add the Pen and the Music

extension to the Scratch IDE every time they start

a new project. Curiously enough, the faster

JavaScript reimplementation of Scratch 3 Pen

blocks caused an upsurge of 3D projects created

by using these blocks;

 the x/y coordinates of the mouse pointer are no

longer shown under the Stage.

2.2.2 Requests for Changes that are Not

Taken into Consideration

As the evolution of the IDE is very slow, at least

compared to the number of proposals for changes

requested by Scratch users

, many reasonable

changes that teachers would really need, basing on

their -often long- experience, are fully rejected.

Just to give an example, one of the authors of this

paper officially proposed the Scratch Team

in 2014

to add a mechanism to temporarily hide the palette of

the blocks and/or the Stage, in order to get a larger

coding area where two scripts could be put side by

“What’s Next for Scratch?” Panel of the Scratch

Conference 2014; program available at the page

https://cdn.scratch.mit.edu/scratchr2/static/__3602e38

2ef14079729b83917a837581a__/pdfs/conference/201

4/Scratch%20at%20MIT%202014%20Conference%2

0Schedule.pdf

Is the Scratch Programming Environment Ideal for all? Enhancements to the Scratch IDE to Make it Easier to Use and More Useful for

Students and Teachers

173

side and then easily compared

. The very quick

answer of the Scratch Team at that time was that this

could confuse young Scratchers. This very same

mechanism, 8 years later, has been easily

implemented and embedded into one of the third-

party Scratch addons that will be described in section

3.1 (Figure 2).

3 TOOLS TO ENHANCE THE

SCRATCH IDE

The code of the Scratch website and editor are open

source, so the obvious solution to the need of having

an enhanced tool with all the features of Scratch

would be creating a Scratch clone with all the

necessary additions. This has already been done.

TurboWarp

is a much faster, higher-quality, and

fully customizable version of Scratch. It can be run

online or downloaded as a standalone desktop app.

Even better, it is able to package Scratch projects as

executables. The only drawback is that to be run on

the Scratch website, a TurboWarp project must be

first downloaded on your own device and then

uploaded to the Scratch online IDE. Furthermore,

TurboWarp still doesn’t offer all the useful additions

that are useful for both students and teachers.

In the following subsections we will describe two

tools, a set of addons called ScratchAddons and an

advanced Scratch clone called Snap! presented by the

University of California at Berkeley.

3.1 Scratch Addons

The fact the TurboWarp cannot be used as an editor

in the Scratch website is why all addons available in

TurboWarp are also available as a Scratch browser

extension for Chrome, for all Chromium-based

browsers and for Firefox

, called Scratch Addons

The Scratch Addons development community is

very active. They interact very effectively with their

users and, as of December 2022, almost 150 addons

affecting all aspects of the Scratch IDE and the

Scratch website have been developed

. Almost

everything in the Scratch IDE can be coloured,

Note that reducing the IDE zoom would not work as a

solution, as the scripts would not be readable when

projected on a screen for the students.

htttp://turbowarp.org

the development of ScratchAddons for Safari has started

on October 2022, https://github.com/ScratchAddons/

ScratchAddons/discussions/3452

stretched, or hidden. In the Scratch Addons settings’

page, every addon can be individually enabled (with

optional sub settings, when available; Figure 3).

Figure 3: The Scratch Addons setting’s page.

In the following sections we will describe a subset

of the addons made available by Scratch Addons that

can make the life of students and teachers much

easier. Features that we are looking for are the

following:

 IDE space management:

o hide Stage and sprite area;

o hide block palette;

o customizable block shape

 saving time:

o search bar in the editor;

o move costumes/sounds to the top/bottom

of their list;

o pasting duplicated scripts right at the

mouse position;

o automatically add Scratch extensions to

the IDE at startup;

o “load costume” as default action for new

costumes

 reducing errors:

o disable automatic saving;

o progress bar for projects during

loading/saving;

o confirm sprite removal;

o fix loading of specific SVG

costumes/backgrounds;

o do not automatically run scripts after

duplication;

o do not run scripts when clicked;

http://scratchaddons.com

Several addons described here have been proposed to the

Scratch Addons community for consideration by the

authors of this paper. When an addon is considered as

relevant for the community, the development and

availability in the official distribution of Scratch Addons

is often a matter of weeks, sometime even days

CSEDU 2023 - 15th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

174

o transparent blocks when dragging them

around

 user friendliness:

o debugger;

o onion skin in the paint editor;

o visible mouse coordinates;

o pause button;

o replace block with other blocks from the

same category;

o dragging files to costumes/sounds tabs;

o save blocks as image;

o coloured border in running blocks;

o jump to custom block definition;

o rename broadcast;

o associate icons to block category buttons;

o fine tuning of project sounds’ volume

 accessibility:

o customizable block colours;

o customizable block text style;

o customizable block shape.

Figure 4: Addon code name.

Now we will see which addons can be used to

solve the more common problems of students or

teachers when using Scratch. In the following, we

will refer to each addon with its code name, as shown

in the addon description page

(Figure 4).

3.1.1 Enhanced Management of the IDE’s

Space

Whereas standard programming IDEs show the code

in a linear fashion, the code of Scratch projects is

organized in a 2D space. This, added to the new, taller

shape of Scratch 3 blocks, makes only a few of the

project scripts visible in the coding area (Figure 1).

This makes difficult to have a clear understanding of

the behaviour of each sprite, as the user has to scroll

the coding area in all directions. Lack of space to

code, due to the everything-always-visible

philosophy of the Scratch IDE described in the

http://scratchaddons/addons

previous sections, can be greatly improved by

enabling the following addons:

 hide-flyout: the block palette can be hidden,

either automatically or -even better- when the

selected category icon is clicked again;

 hide-stage: add a button above the Stage to

hides/shows the Stage and the sprite area;

 custom-block-shape: allow to reduce the size -

especially the height- of the blocks.

Figure 5: The “Breakout” project in the enhanced Scratch

IDE. The addons for IDE space management allow for a

larger coding area and thinner blocks.

Thanks to these addons, both teachers and

students can arrange in a clearer way their scripts in

the coding area (Figure 5), so to better see and

understand their dependences, their similarities, or

their differences without having to use the zoom out

feature of the Scratch IDE coding area, that will make

the text of the blocks too small.

3.1.2 Saving Time

Students, especially those ones not very self-

motivated as they are not interested per se in the

topics of computer programming, tend to drop very

quickly the study of computer science as they find

annoying having to repeat the same actions without

real necessity. Time spent in repetitive operations can

now be reduced, so to avoid students to be annoyed

by having to repeat actions without necessity, by

enabling the following addons:

 editor-devtools: an additional search bar allows

to find all “event” blocks -for examples all

messages sent and received- that occur in all the

scripts and all the sprites of the project;

 editor-devtools: when a script is duplicated with

CTRL+V, it is attached to the mouse pointer, so

that it can be immediately placed where desired;

 jump-to-def: allow to immediately find the

definition of a custom block;

Is the Scratch Programming Environment Ideal for all? Enhancements to the Scratch IDE to Make it Easier to Use and More Useful for

Students and Teachers

175

 load-extensions: the categories of the extensions

that are most used by the user, for example the

Pen and Music categories, and that have been

removed from the standard set of Scratch 3.0

categories, are automatically added back to the

block palette every time the editor is open;

 block-switching: allow to replace a block with a

related block -for example to replace if with if

else; hide with show, etc- by selecting the name

of a new block in the contextual menu;

 rename-broadcasts: allow to rename a message

in a send/receive block. Much more efficient

when compared to creating a new message and

replacing it in all send/receive blocks;

 ctrl-click-run-scripts and fix-pasted-scripts:

avoid scripts involuntarily run (causing

undesired and not easily revertible changes to the

Stage content) when scripts are dragged or

snapped to other blocks;

 move-to-top-bottom: costumes and sounds can be

moved right to the top/bottom of the list they

belong by right-clicking them; this is really

useful when, for example in animation-based

projects with hundreds of costumes, dragging

costumes to the top/bottom takes a long time as

the costume list does not autoscroll during

dragging, so that the costume must be dropped

and regrasped many and many times; this also

avoids problems when the costume is dropped by

mistake during dragging and it is “lost”;

 blocks2image: images of scripts can be exported

in PNG/SVG format and can be used to quickly

prepare slides or books for the lessons;

 paint-by-default: this addon allows, for example,

to automatically upload a new costume/sound

when the “new costume/background/sound”

buttons is clicked, instead of having to select the

upload option in the popup menu (Figure 6).

Figure 6: Default “choose a sprite (from the Scratch

Library)” action for the “new sprite” Scratch button (left)

and new custom “upload sprite (from your computer)”

action (right).

3.1.3 Reducing User Errors

Avoiding mistakes is an excellent way to reduce the

frustration and to increase the trust of the students

both in their teachers and in the Scratch tool (Hertzu

and Hornbæk, 2023). When errors are frequent, less

motivated students tend to lose interest and to drop

out (Figueiredo and García-Peñalvo, 2020). Some of

the most common sources of errors can be removed

from Scratch by enabling the following addons:

 disable-auto-save: every time we update our

projects, the online Scratch IDE automatically

saves all the changes, so that we do not risk

losing our work if the internet connection is lost.

So, when we add new features to already fully

working projects, the projects will temporarily

stop working if we do not save them with a new

name before we start updating it. Disabling

autosave is a risky operation, but this will very

likely avoid us to lose working versions of our

projects;

 remove-sprite-confirm: when a sprite is

selected, a trash bin button with an “x” sign shows up

at the sprite thumbnail’s top-right corner. In standard

Scratch, by clicking this button the sprite will be

deleted without any warning. If we then delete

another sprite, only the last deleted sprite will be

recovered by using the Restore option of the Edit

menu. So, if we delete a sprite by mistake, we are not

sure that we will be able to recover it. This addons

allow us to get a warning every time a sprite is deleted

(Figure 7), avoiding that sprites are lost unwillingly.

Figure 7: The warning enabled by the remove-sprite-

confirm addon when the trash bin icon is clicked.

 transparent-orphans: dragged blocks can be

made transparent. This is particularly handy

when reporter blocks are dragged to be

embedded in other blocks’ arguments, as it is

often difficult to see if the block, when dropped,

it is going to certainly fit the argument (Figure 8,

left). With this addon enabled, the “fitting”

argument highlighting is visible under the

dragged reporter (Figure 8, right);

CSEDU 2023 - 15th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

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Figure 8: The not-fully-visible first argument of the green

operator in a classic Scratch IDE (left) and the same

highlighted argument visible behind the transparent

reporter (right) when the transparent-orphans addon is

enabled.

 progress-bar: when a large project is loaded or

saved, it can take a while to complete the

operation. In the meantime, there are no signs

that everything is going as expected. When there

are network problems, the “saving in progress”

To avoid that students will stop the

loading/saving process just before it is

completed, a progress bar giving a clear

indication of how the operation is proceeding can

be enabled

(Figure 9);

Figure 9: The standard Scratch saving indicator (left) and

the richer indicator enabled by the progress-bar addon

(right).

 fix-uploaded-svgs: SVG files produced by

several drawing apps (ArtWorks, Affinity

Designer, etc.) are not correctly loaded by

Scratch. Enabling this addon, all SVG files are

correctly imported as Scratch costumes.

3.1.4 Enhanced User-Friendliness

Scratch IDE has been designed to be very user-

friendly. Everything is clearly visible and organized,

and the IDE is almost self-explanatory. Adding

further user-friendly features to the Scratch IDE

makes both programming with Scratch and

understanding Scratch scripts even easier, so users are

more likely going to get interested in exploring the

environment and teachers can more clearly explain

the behaviour of their scrips. New useful features in

this direction can be added by Scratch Addons to the

Scratch IDE by enabling the following addons:

See for example projects https://scratch.mit.edu/

projects/554574719 or https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/

622657902.

 debugger: the debugger is a fundamental tool in

every programming language. This addon allows

users to run Scratch scripts step by step. This

feature allows the teacher to highlight the

behaviour of each block when they are

illustrating a given script, or to clarify the

interaction between several scripts. It also allows

the user to identify problems caused by an

unforeseen incorrect interaction between several

scripts;

 pause: a pause button is added between the start

and stop buttons, right above the Stage. When it

is clicked it pauses the project execution until the

user press it again. It is useful when a teacher is

explaining how a given project works, allowing

them to momentarily pause the execution, show

the scripts or describe their inner working, then

resuming the execution;

 editor-stepping: when the debugger is not

enabled, the possibility of highlighting the block

currently executed, that is lost since Scratch 2, is

brought back by this addon; even if it is less

precise than the original Scratch 1 feature, it is

very useful to understand more easily how an

algorithm works;

 onion-skinning: Scratch is a programming

environment based on media. If the

teacher/student is interested in creating good

quality animations -useful for science or

storytelling, where you need to perfectly position

multiple costumes of a single sprite

- the

possibility of seeing transparent overlays of the

previous/next costume(s) is very useful. This is

something that has been often requested to the

Scratch Team in the past as a necessary addition

to the Scratch paint editor

;

 mouse-pos: whereas in Scratch 1 and 2 the mouse

location was always visible under the Stage, this

reference disappeared in Scratch 3. As students

often struggle to clearly discriminate between the

x and y coordinates (Battista, 2007; Battista et

al., 2017), this feature it is very useful when the

coordinates of the Stage are explained, or to

know what the exact final position of a sprite

movement is going to be without having to

actually move the sprites around. When this

addon is enabled, the x/y coordinates of the

mouse are clearly shown right above the Stage;

 drag-drop: both pictures for new costumes or

new backgrounds, and audio files for new sounds

can be dragged from the PC folder to the

https://scratch.mit.edu/discuss/topic/556991

Is the Scratch Programming Environment Ideal for all? Enhancements to the Scratch IDE to Make it Easier to Use and More Useful for

Students and Teachers

177

costume/background/sound lists in the Scratch

IDE. This is particularly handy for young and

non-CS-majoring students, that are used to their

touch devices and are not familiar with the tree-

structure of the folders in a file system (Chin,

2021);

 block-palette-icons: in order to learn faster how

to associate category colours to their functions,

icons are added inside every coloured category

button (Figure 10) as widely recognized

(Lodding, 1983; Harrison et al., 2011);

Figure 10: Standard coloured category buttons in the

Scratch IDE (left) and the enhanced category buttons with

an icon inside (right). For example, the Looks category is

represented by an eye-shaped icon, the Sound category by

a loudspeaker, etc.

 vol-slider: when explaining projects with sounds

or voice, teachers may want to keep the

sound/voice running but at the same time to

reduce their volume to allow students to clearly

hear their voice. Teachers can use this addon to

make a volume slider visible right above the

Stage, at the right of the stop button. In this way

they can have a finer control than just switching

off the browser volume and an easier way to

handle the volume instead of using the volume

controls of their OS.

3.1.5 Accessibility

As up to 20% of students can be affected by

dyslexia/dyscalculia (Federici et al. 2022), the

Scratch Team started in October 2022 to study

possible modifications to the Scratch IDE to make it

more accessible. Their first proposal (currently under

review at their Scratch Lab website

) was to change

the colours of Scratch blocks, so that people with low

vision can read them better (Figure 11). If accepted,

this proposal will make the future Scratch blocks

“easier to read for all Scratchers”.

http://lab.scratch.mit.edu/contrast-blocks/

https://snap.berkeley.edu/old_site/old-byob.html

Figure 11: Standard Scratch blocks (left) and the new, more

accessible proposal (right).

The same result can be obtained by using a

specific addon. The advantage of using an addon is

twofold: if Scratch Addons users want to immediately

use more contrasted block colours, they can do that

stand they can keep using all their customizations that

would not be available in the Scratch Lab website or

in the future Scratch; if, instead, they do not like the

new proposal (that, as already said about Scratch

evolution, if accepted would become the standard for

everyone) the can go back to the current block

colours, by means of the same addon. Useful addons

of Scratch Addons for dyslexic students are the

following ones:

 editor-theme3: it allows you to choose your own

colour for each block category, so to create a

better contrast, as in Scratch Lab (Rello and

Bigham, 2017; Federici et al., 2022);

 custom-block-text: it allows you to select a

thicker font with an optional shadow, so to create

a more readable block text (Rello et al., 2014;

Federici et al., 2022);

 custom-block-shape: it allows you to increase the

size -especially the height- of the blocks, so to

increase the line spacing (Madhavan et al., 2016;

Federici et al., 2022);

3.2 Snap!

A lot has already been done by Scratch Addons

developers, but many, major or minor, enhancements

to the Scratch IDE are still missing. Some addons -

like the pause button, the debugger, the possibility to

enlarge/reduce the space taken by the block palette or

the Stage- seem borrowed from a famous Scratch

modification whose developer, Jens Moenig, started

in 2007 by adding strings and lists to Scratch 1.2 and

then in 2010 moved to create BYOB, its own first

Scratch modification

where users could create their

own blocks (Harvey and Moenig, 2010). In 2011, in

collaboration with Brian Harvey, Moenig started the

development of Snap!

, a very advanced Scratch

http://snap.berkley.edu

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modification similar to Scratch but packed with many

powerful mechanisms.

Figure 12: Standard Snap! blocks of the Movement

category (left) and a reduced set of Movement blocks that

can be easily created in Snap! (right).

The Snap! 8.0.0 environment has now many other

interesting features. Among them, after being

requested by many teachers using Snap! for their

lessons

, there is the possibility to selectively hide

the blocks in the palette, so that beginners are not

overwhelmed by the amount of available -but still

unknown- blocks (Figure 12). Incidentally, this

possibility is also very useful for students with

dyslexia, that can avoid the effect of visual crowding

of the IDE (Bellocchi, 2013; Federici et al., 2022).

4 FUTURE ENHANCEMENTS

Not all the advanced features that would help us as

teachers and would -very likely- help our students

when we use Scratch in the lessons of our Computer

Science courses, or that could help in general students

with dyslexia (Federici et al. 2022) are available in

ScratchAddons or Snap!.

One very important feature that is still missing is

for example the possibility to show the coding areas

of several sprite at the same time (Figure 14). This

possibility would allow us and our students to

compare the scripts of several sprite, to easily notice

small differences in similar scripts of different sprites

or to immediately see the connection among scripts

from different sprites (e.g., when using broadcast or

sensors). As of now, the ways to get a similar result

are the following ones:

 using slides: the visualization in this case is

limited by the limited space of the slide, but

every necessary element can be clearly organized

“The Future of Snap!”, Snap!Con 2019 conference,

Stuttgart, https://youtu.be/YCqzXAIAhJw

and highlighted. Another problem with this

technique is that the visualization is static;

 using several Scratch windows at the same time:

thanks to the hide-flyout, hide-stage, and custom-

block-shape, more windows can be put side-by-

side, still making their coding area visible. The

visualization is dynamic but, due to the size of

the Scratch IDE frame, when the scripts are

compared on a projected screen that must be

clearly visible at a distance, no more than two

windows can be used (Figure 13).

Figure 13: Opening two Scratch windows to see the scripts

of two sprites side-by-side.

Clearly, organizing the windows so to get the

correct visualization takes some time that is

unfortunately wasted, so it cannot be done on a need

basis during the lesson. The correct way of doing this

could be applying the hide-flyout and hide-stage

addons (Figure 14).

Figure 14: Showing three sprite coding areas instead of a

single coding area.

By using these addons more sprites -for example

by selecting them by CTRL/CMD+click on their

thumbnails in the sprite area- could be allowed to

show several coding areas at the same time.

Last, to improve the comprehension of students

with dyslexia (Thompson, 2019; Federici et al.,

2022), the scripts could be read out loud, either by

Is the Scratch Programming Environment Ideal for all? Enhancements to the Scratch IDE to Make it Easier to Use and More Useful for

Students and Teachers

179

pressing a key combination or by selecting an option

in the script’s contextual menu (Figure 15).

Figure 15: New option to read scripts out loud in the script

contextual menu.

Using the accessibility features already available

in modern OSs (e.g., the “Narrator” in Windows or

the “Spoken Content” in macOS) would not be

sufficient to solve this problem, as only the arguments

of the blocks would be read out loud, not the block

text. To solve the problem, a better integration with

the accessibility features is required. This is not true

for the reverse need, that is entering text in the block

arguments. Activating the accessibility features of the

OS (e.g., “Voice Typing” in Windows or “Dictation”

in macOS) allow to solve very well this problem

(Federici et at. 2022). The integration with the

accessibility features could be improved by adding a

microphone icon in the block arguments when they

are clicked (Figure 16

Figure 16: Integration and usage of accessibility features to

enter the values of block arguments.

Clearly, to make these future enhancements easily

available to all users, they will have to be

implemented as addons that, once installed in the

browser, will allow to further extend the features of

the online version of Scratch.

5 CONCLUSIONS

Using a block language like Scratch is a great help

when teaching either to young students or to students

that are not majoring in STEM subjects. However, the

strengths of Scratch, like being a very simple visual

environment, or being available in more than 60

languages, are not sufficient to give to all students and

teachers all the necessary tools in order to make the

explanation and the comprehension process quick and

easy.

Due to the will of the Scratch Team not to add too

many new features to Scratch, fulfilling their main

goal of keeping it simple, enhancing the online

version Scratch with third-party mechanisms is an

excellent way of making available a more powerful

IDE still keeping all the advantages of the online

website and community.

The additions proposed in this work to make

Scratch easier to use for students and teachers have

been mainly independently developed by the Scratch

Addons community (only a small part of them being

requested by the authors of this work) but aim to bring

back useful features of the Scratch IDE that have been

lost in more recent releases or to add new features that

are felt necessary even by other users. For each

feature that we have personally verified as being

useful for students and teachers, the didactic

motivations behind our strong support have been

presented.

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