Scratch is being featured as part of Hour of Code, an initiative to encourage students and teachers to try coding for the first time. We're expecting thousands of people new to Scratch, especially December 9 to 15. You can help by welcoming and answering questions from new Scratchers!

Also, try out the create a greeting card tutorial we made for Hour of Code. We've added new holiday images you can use in a card–or add your own. When you're finished, add your project to the Hour of Code studio here: http://scratch.mit.edu/studios/279432/

Having thousands of new users trying out Scratch all at once may put some strain on our servers. As a result, we may need to temporarily disable some features: search will get diverted to google search, and the explore page may be disabled. If we absolutely have to, we may disable commenting and forum posts during peak hours. If we do have to turn features off, once the load eases up we'll turn everything back on again - don't worry.

Scratch On!

How cool!

Awesome Scratch is really growing, ever since the 2.0 release.

Awesome, more Scratchers!

gravtest wrote:

Awesome Scratch is really growing, ever since the 2.0 release.

I know! Have you looked at the stats page lately? It's humongificent:
http://scratch.mit.edu/statistics/

Awesome!

Great! Will this also mean that we won't be able to welcome people on the Welcoming Committee at peak hours because of commenting being disabled?

It sounds like the underground… Happy to help!

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EH7meow wrote:

Great! Will this also mean that we won't be able to welcome people on the Welcoming Committee at peak hours because of commenting being disabled?

Good question! Hopefully commenting won't have to be disabled so that the Welcoming Committee can stay active! If it is, perhaps changing project notes to explain and welcome them to come back–what do you think?

Good luck servers

If you ask me, the site is really slow already. Why in particular will it be December 9-15? Are those the days of the event, or just the days Scratch is featured?

I sort of like that google search better than the normal search

natalie wrote:

EH7meow wrote:

Great! Will this also mean that we won't be able to welcome people on the Welcoming Committee at peak hours because of commenting being disabled?

Good question! Hopefully commenting won't have to be disabled so that the Welcoming Committee can stay active! If it is, perhaps changing project notes to explain and welcome them to come back–what do you think?

Yes, maybe the Scratch Team could send out some sort of message to anybody who has a project in that studio asking them to add a note. Or maybe the Scratch Team could get something to automatically add some sort of message to all projects in the Welcoming Committee.

Lightnin wrote:

gravtest wrote:

Awesome Scratch is really growing, ever since the 2.0 release.

I know! Have you looked at the stats page lately? It's humongificent:
http://scratch.mit.edu/statistics/

Indeed I have. It must be very exciting to run/contribute to an educational initiative and to have it be this successful.

And yeah, I hope there aren't TOO many memory overflows during the spike.

Wow! That's an amazing thing for scratch! It's growing a lot! Now, it's been featured in a national program with other amazing sites, like Khanacademy and Codeacademy, and it makes me feel great to be a part of this website!

I've seen you added a “Holiday” theme, but why is there nothing there?

This is really cool! Even from just my one year on scratch, I have seen it grow so much, it is incredible!

ProdigyZeta7 wrote:

Awesome, more Scratchers!

That's nice! I hope everyone has a happy holiday!

Awesome! Is there a specific way I can reach out and meet these scratchers?

A good Christmas present would be three or four new servers! And a finished lag-free Flash player!