The Official ScratchJr Book

PREFACE

This book’s history stretches back 50 years when, in the 1960s, Seymour Papert presented a bold new vision of how computers might enter the lives of children. At the time, computers still cost tens of thousands of dollars, if not more. The first personal computers would not become commercially available for another decade. But Seymour foresaw that computers would eventually become accessible for everyone, even children, and he lay the intellectual foundation for how computing could transform the ways children learn and play.

While other researchers imagined that computers might someday be used to deliver information to children or pose questions to children, Seymour had a very different vision. He believed that children should be in control ...