Welcome!

What is Scratch?

Scratch is an authoring tool developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There are 2 particularly innovative features:

An effective visual approach towards creating multimedia and interactive content for websites.
Convenient methods for sharing and re-using content for websites.

What is London Labs?

This website contains Scratch projects that have been designed for use by students in primary schools (UK Reception to Year 6). Each project is designed to meet specific learning outcomes as described by the National Strategies framework documents, which is part of the UK government Department for Children, Schools and Families.

In the same spirit as the original Scratch project, this website provides:

Active learning resources for children in primary schools. The main purpose of the website is to provide quality learning resources for math, literacy and computing skills development.
The Scratch project files for free download. This enables children, teachers and parents to modify the projects on this website for their own learning objectives.

How to get started?

Use the menu on the left side of the page to explore and play with current Scratch projects. The projects are organized by year (UK Reception to Year 6). Using the projects online do not require any specific software installation, but, do generally require the web browser to support Java.
If you want to modify any of the projects or explore the Scratch software further, then download a copy for your Windows or Linux computer.
Download one of the current projects and try changing it yourself!

Who is responsible for London Labs?

This website was created by Chi Nguyen, who lives with his wife and two children in London. The kids are starting Reception and Year 5 in September. One of the challenges of parenting is to provide a home environment that encourages homework and emphasizes the value of learning. The visual approach and multimedia features make Scratch ideally suited for assisting that parental objective.

He teaches at the University of Portsmouth and also created the Mosaic website for online submission, feedback and marking of student coursework. Mosaic is based on an open source wiki package and contains custom functionalities for teaching and learning. His teaching and research materials are available online at cnfolio.com

Want to learn more?

Please use this contact form for information about workshops to learn and use Scratch. Workshops are available in London for children, parents and teachers:

Single session with introduction to Scratch (2 hours)
5 sessions with the goal of children producing their own projects (10 hours)