Tencent Games has announced a cooperation with Scratch, the programming playground developed by MIT Media Lab to help kids learn how to code.
The partnership will see Tencent integrate its platforms with Scratch, including Tencent Cloud, WeChat, and QQ for community sharing features, and Tencent Games to enhance Scratch’s creative offering. Tencent Games will also host a “Scratch Day” in Shenzhen on April 13th.
At the same time, Tencent is launching a coding platform based on Scratch for primary and secondary school students. The platform will serve close to 1,000 schools and has already launched with Peking University’s affiliated primary and secondary school, as well as the Shenzhen Mingde Elementary and Middle School.
Launched in 2007 out of the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab, Scratch is a free programming language and community platform aimed at equipping aspiring programmers—especially kids—with fundamental coding skills.
More than 37 million users are registered and close to 40 million projects have been shared on Scratch, and the largest age group on the platform is those aged 10 to 14. The platform counts nearly a million users in China, representing less than 3% of the platform’s population. Scratch has more than 16 million users in the US, accounting for over 45% of its user base.