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China's enthusiasm for teaching children to code is facing a new roadblock as organizations and students lose an essential tool: the Scratch programming language developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab.

China-based internet users can no longer access Scratch's website. Greatfire.org, an organization that monitors internet censorship in China, shows that the website was 100% blocked as early as August 20, while a Scratch user flagged the ban on August 14.

Nearly 60 million children around the world have used Scratch's visual programming language to make games, animations, stories and the likes. That includes students in China, which is seeing a gold rush to early coding as the country tries to turn its 200 million kids into world-class tech talents.


At last count, 5.65% or 3 million of Scratch's registered users are based in China, though its reach is greater than the figure suggests as many Chinese developers have built derivatives based on Scratch, an open-source software.

Projects on Scratch contains "a great deal of humiliating, fake, and libelous content about China," including placing Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan in a dropdown list of "countries", a state-run news outlet reported on August 21.

The article added that "any service distributing information in China" must comply with local regulations, and Scratch's website and user forum had been shut down in the country.

What a Bleep

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