A new computer programme aims to make it simple for kids to create stories, games, music and animation for the web. The free programming tool, called Scratch, is easy to use. It works a bit like Lego — you build up things piece by piece. “With Scratch we want to let kids be the creators,” said Professor Mitchel Resnick, one of the inventors. The digital toolkit, developed in the US at MIT’s Media Lab, allows people to blend images, sound and video. Objects and characters are chosen from a menu and created or simply cut and pasted

off the web and then are animated by choosing different actions.