Scratch featured in “Communications of the ACM”

First a short story:

While travaling this summer I met two IT teachers in a german train discussing about an interesting piece of software their kids have found on the web. They wanted to use it in school since the kids love it. They complained that there was not enough time in school to check out interesting new things like this and that the regular german study plan contains only the boring stuff so kids mostly turn away from programming. To them it was a revolutionary approach and kids loved playing and working with this software (mostly after school). It was not a game - it was a software to build, explore and simulate ideas and share them using projects.

To my surprise they talked about Scratch and after a while I was part of the conversation. I explained that it was built using an open source software called Squeak in a programming language called Smalltalk, told that that there is more to discover and pointed them to www.squeak.org, the OpenCroquet 3D environment and the german squeak e.V. (an organisation to make Squeak also known in school). They definitely wanted to checkout all the websites I wrote down on a small piece of paper...

And now the news:

Meanwhile Scratch has more and more interest from people all over the world and is now also featured in an article in the “Communications of the ACM”. Squeak new knows more about this.