Scratch is an online, drag and drop, programming environment developed at MIT. The interface facilitates both animation and interactive programming. Scratch has a large and supportive community where users share their projects and can view the coding of other members’ projects and can freely remix them. A novel feature of this environment is the remix tree. It tracks where each remixed project comes from all the way back to the initial creation as well as displaying all other projects that came from the same root work.
https://scratch.mit.edu/
I have used Scratch many times in my intermediate classroom and the students love it. However, they also let me know about Scratch Junior, which is an app for the iPad or tablet and is aimed at primary school aged children. It is very similar to Scratch in that it has the drag and drop function but used on the touch screen which is easier for little fingers. The options for functions is a bit more limited but it works in the same way. I have recently downloaded it onto my iPad to use with my 6 year old grandson, who is loving being able to make rockets fly and cats jump. Soon he will be programming his own games and be able to move up to Scratch!
Interesting. We have a significant number of Ipads in our school. I may have to ook into this further 🙂