Scratch is a new programming environment that kids can use to create their own animated stories, video games, and interactive art -- and share their creations with one another across the Internet.

To create Scratch programs, kids snap together graphical building blocks, each representing a different command or action. Kids learn important computational ideas as they transform images, mix in sound clips and drum beats, and integrate inputs from real-world sensors.

Scratch is designed especially for use at Computer Clubhouses and other after-school centers, empowering young people (ages 8-18) to express themselves fluently and creatively with new technologies.

The NSF-funded Scratch project is a collaboration between the Lifelong Kindergarten research group at the MIT Media Lab and the KIDS research group at the UCLA Graduate School of Education & Information Studies.

Scratch will be available for public release in Summer 2006.

Crickets are tiny computers that can make things spin, light up, and play music. You can plug lights, motors, sensors, and other devices into a Cricket, then write computer programs to tell them how to react and behave. With Crickets, you can create musical sculptures, interactive jewelry, dancing creatures, and other artistic inventions -- and learn important math, science, and engineering ideas in the process.

Crickets are based on more than a decade of NSF-funded educational research. Lifelong Kindergarten researchers collaborated with the LEGO company to create the first "programmable bricks," squeezing computational power into LEGO bricks. This research led to the LEGO MindStorms robotics kits, now used by millions of people around the world. While LEGO MindStorms is designed especially for making robots, Crickets are designed especially for making artistic creations. Crickets were refined in collaboration with the Playful Invention and Exploration (PIE) museum network, and are now sold as a product through the Playful Invention Company (PICO).