Is Scratch Really Safe for Kids?
Short answer: YES!
Safety Review for scratch.mit.edu
Here at Coder Kids, we love Scratch! We offer several after school programs and summer camps that involve Scratch.
Scratch is a programming language designed by MIT for children learning to code. It teaches beginner coders the fundamentals of coding so that they can move on more easily to advance program languages. To learn more about Scratch, check out this blogpost.
We’ve spent a lot of time on Scratch, and even interacte with some members of the MIT Scratch Team. We can safely say that every effort is made to keep the Scratch community kid-safe. There are Scratch Community Guidelines you can check out here, along with Section 3 (Rules of Usage) in the Terms of Use. These guidelines emphasize keeping information private (not sharing real names, addresses, etc), being respectful and reporting people or projects that are not.
The language filters for comments on Scratch are strong, so that helps ensure a kid-friendly environment. There is no direct-messaging on Scratch, so no private messages can be shared- everything is public. This decreases the chances of private bullying (as long as your child doesn’t give out any additional information about themselves). If a user does bully someone, they can easily block/report them.
One thing to be careful of on Scratch is violent or mildly inappropriate content. While something extremely inappropriate would certainly be picked up by the Scratch filters, things that some parents might consider inappropriate might be appropriate by Scratch standards. We have seen some projects with guns or blood, but that is not the norm.
While Scratch may not be 100% safe 100% of the time, it safer than probably any other place kids can go online. The Scratch community is one of the many reasons why we love Scratch so much!
