Man, every day I wish more and more that I had the opportunity to attend MIT. It’s just like the greatest place on earth for a geek to go. They recently made open and free their course catalog via the web, which showed me how a real and well put class should be (not that my college was bad at all, but there’s just no comparison). Now the same group that came up with Lego Mindstorms (next to ninjas and transformers for greatest invention ever) came up with one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen, one that I’ll add to my list of “why didn’t I have this when I was a kid?“.

Scratch is a simple and intuitive programing environment designed for kids 8 and up. It’s based on an entirely graphical model, with programming instructions, variables, sounds, images, actions, et all, modeled after Lego-like figures that you can drag and paste to each other. Depending on what you put together, you may get anything from a silly cat walking side to side and making sounds (which I did), to a full-fledged Donkey Kong game. The whole thing is really intuitive and easy to use, with colors differentiating the types of constructs, and shapes letting you know what construct you can paste to another. And that’s not all. From Ars-Technica:

Scratch saves its finished files in its own .SB format, but users can upload their finished products to the Scratch home page with the click of a button, a very Web 2.0 addition. Other users can then download and comment on these projects. Some of the projects are simple, but others are more involved. An addictive puzzle game called Slider by Steve LoBasso consumed much of the time I was meant to be writing this review.

There is also an option to save the finished project without uploading it to the Scratch web site, which involves downloading a Java applet from the Scratch web site. The Java applet, which calls the .SB file directly, can then be embedded in any web site.

The program is currently available for Windows and Mac OS X, with a Linux version supposedly on the way (though I doubt there’s a lot of kids out there that use Linux). I downloaded it and tried it on my Macbook, and it’s really fast, stable and intuitive. For more information on the project, click here. As we say in my country, whoever invented this, has never seen a platano, not even in pictures.