The most popular game on Scratch is Paper Minecraft v11.6 (Minecraft 2D), with over 400,000 hearts. This is according to scratchstats.com and their page dedicated to the "most loved Scratch projects." Next most popular is Geometry Dash v1.5 (320K+ hearts), followed by Getting Over It v1.4 (146K+ hearts). Amazingly, each of these games was created by griffpatch, who is the most followed account on Scratch, with nearly 400K followers.
If any of these figures are a surprise to you, and you'd like to learn more about Scratch and how your child can launch their journey into coding and/or game creation, let's continue!
What is Scratch?
For those who don't know, Scratch is an online website that gives creators the power to code and build easy games, providing an outlet to bring ideas to life with animation and storytelling!
In fact, if you jump over to Scratch right now, you'll quickly notice just how many different types of games and animations exist—pretty amazing, right?
(Speaking of jumping and Scratch!)
And that's one of the best things about bringing code and art together: if kids can dream it up, they can make it real with a little bit of practice.
Example Scratch Projects
And "dream it up" is exactly what kids are doing!
Musical games where you click on penguins to play musical notes...
Or more traditional arcade style adventures where you use arrow keys to blast meteors before they reach your ship...
How about monsters, where you click and drag objects around in order to uncover all of the ghastly ghouls hiding in the forest.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
How to Code in Scratch
With Scratch, kids learn with visual code blocks to create games that can move, make sounds, and track players' scores. By connecting these blocks of code together, they learn how to program their own games.
There are motion blocks, which control the movement of a Scratch sprite, looks blocks which change the appearance of a sprite, and sound blocks which add sound effects or music to a sprite.
All of these blocks - and more - connect like a puzzle to give kids a fun and empowering coding experience.
Get Started
Again, kids can create almost anything they can imagine—all they need is art and code (and perhaps some of these useful Scratch tips)! Not only is it an engaging and entertaining experience, but it provides a valuable launching pad toward other kids coding languages.