S2JS helps you move beyond Scratch to Javascript.

If you've enjoyed coding in Scratch, but find yourself bumping up against its limitations and would like to take the next step in programming Javascript, then S2JS is for you. You'll be able to write Scratch-like games that run anywhere, including on your friends smartphones.

Frequently Asked Questions

What if you don't already know Scratch?

Scratch is awesome. It's certainly possible to use S2JS is you haven't done coding in Scratch as long as you've used other ('proper') programming tools that involve "loops" and "if-then-else" and "variables". If you've never heard of these things, then head on over to Scratch and start learning how to code. When Scratch is starting to feel a little tight around the armpits, come back here.

Pricing

S2JS is free - free like a free lunch, but with less food.

Free for reasonable, non-commercial educational use. More details under Terms of Use.

What age groups is S2JS appropriate for ?

It's not so much about age, but about how much Scratching you've done. You need to be very comfortable making sprites move around and using variables. You should be a master of repeat and if-then-else blocks, and it would be great (but not essential) if you know about cloning and "make a block".

Does it matter if I skip around the tutorial sections ?

Pretty much does. The sections are constructed with a careful flow - the coding introduced in one section will be used in the next section as a basis to introduce another new thing. If you skip around, you may find yourself feeling a bit lost.

Even if you've done some Javascript before, we'd recommend you follow the lesson flow. You might want to go through fairly quickly, but that's better than diving into the middle and not fully understanding.

How many programs / images can we store ?

As many until it gets unwieldy for you - which is possibly a dozen or so. This is by design - S2JS is an education tool to help Scratchers get fired up about Javascript.

If you're developing something massive, then it's time to go find a proper IDE, and S2JS will have happily done it's job. If you use S2JS to store multi-megabyte programs you grabbed from somewhere else for dodgy purposes, we will delete them without notice. Please don't do this.

Can we use S2JS in our coding class or club ?

Yes, please do. In fact, that seems to be where S2JS works best.

Many providers use a Flipped Classroom approach, where kids work through the S2JS tutorials, and the teacher roams the room providing custom one-on-one assistance as required.

Many teachers will also periodically set a group goal or challenge, to establish a checkpoint and ensure everyone is achieving proper comprehension and not just click click clicking ahead. You decide what you want the kids to achieve, and they do their work in their private S2JS project area.

As a teacher, you can also use our Teacher Console to monitor students progress and work.

How does the Teacher Console work ?

If you're a school teacher or club organizer, the Teacher Console lets you keep track of your students, see what tutition modules they've been through and how long they spent on each one, as well as seeing the programs they've been working on -- source and execution.

You create a teacher group, and are then provided with a special S2JS url. Any student accessing S2JS via that url becomes a permanent member of your group.

Kids can be members of more than one group, groups can have more than one owner, and owners can have more than one group.

The Teacher Console is a great place to keep an eye on your kids progress.

Can I charge money for that ?

We have no problem with you using S2JS as part of an educational service for which you charge a fee. You can't charge for access to S2JS, but you can charge for your resources and tuition.

Why are images limited to 120k ?

We're not Google, you know. We're not made of money so they've got to be limited to something. The goal was to provide a simple place for private image storage that isn't likely to be blocked by your school firewall. If you can access S2JS, you can access its image storage.

You can always store your larger images on a separate image-sharing website (whatever your firewall allows), and just reference those urls in the programs you store on S2JS.

Why Javascript ?

Many educators head towards Python as the natural progression after coding in Scratch. Python is a fine language with many good features as well as one or two horrendous ones. The problem with Python is it doesn't achieve the goal of running in a browser without installation and providing proper game-quality graphics you can immediately share with your friends on their own diverse devices.

Javascript certainly has its shortcomings, but we feel the advantages listed above combined with its real-world applicability makes it a good next step in kids coding careers.

Didn't you know there's an easier/shorter/more elegant way to <do a certain thing> ?

Yeah, maybe we did. Frequently we'll do something in several steps when it could be done in one.

The goal is for users to see how to build up complex things from simple things, rather than present them with a lengthy nested expression and have their mind boggle. Far better to do it over three lines, and have them follow every step.

We also try to be mindful of what subset of Javascript they've actually been introduced to. Hopefully, in due course, they'll snort with derision and recode it as a single statement - having totally understood why.

But if you see something where you think we've missed a simpler path, notwithstanding the preceding comments, then please do let us know.

I think you're teaching bad style when you <do a certain thing> ?

Similar to above. Our goal is not to teach people how to write industrial-strength webpages that will run on every browser since IE 1.0. Our goal is to provide a path to enthusiasm for things beyond Scratch, and to sidestep as many hurdles as possible along the way. Inserting a hundred calls to getElementById would not enhance enthusiasm.

Why can't you spell ?

We use Australian spelling for words like "colour". Eventually we'll get around to providing appropriate spelling depending on your location.

What should I do when I find a bug, typo, contradiction, etc ?

Please let us know. Bugs and typos do not besmirch one's honour, but unfixed bugs and typos most certainly will.

Can I use S2JS as a general purpose place to store code that I've grabbed from somewhere else to assist me with malware or adblocking and whatever?

You'd be surprised how many people seem to think the answer to this is yes, but actually it's no. If you put anything like this on S2JS it will be deleted without notice. Similarly, just grabbing large chunks of code and saving it on S2JS as a place to keep it is unappreciated and will also be deleted.

There are many other places on the Internet you can freely use for general code storage. Please use those. The purpose of S2JS is to help you make your first steps in Javascript, and give you a place to store your own programs in pursuit of that.

Who are you and why are you doing this ?

I taught myself electronics and machine language programming as a teenager in the late 1970's.

From there I got a degree in Computer Science and started my career at a medium-sized company. Six years later I quit my job and freelanced while looking around for ideas. I ended up writing some software and starting a company, which I ran for 20 years before selling it to a large multinational.

No longer working, I became involved in my daughters school and was actively involved in a coding club for six years, where I saw hundreds of kids enthused about Scratch, but lose interest in trying to make the leap to Python or Javascript. Or Unity, or any number of other things.

It made me realise something needed to bridge the gap between Scratch and "lines of code" languages, so I used my experiences at the primary and high school to create S2JS.

Computing has been good to me, so I'm happy to self-fund S2JS.

If you're interested in how teenagers explored computing at the dawn of the modern industry, click here for a MITS Altair Simulator that provides a true-life simulation of the type of computers we used. The "good old days" were not then; they are now.

Copyright

Text, Javascript source code, HTML and courseware is (c) Copyright 2014-2021 S2JS and Ian Davies.

Scratch, the Scratch Cat, and portions of certain screenshots are copyright MIT Media Lab.

Scratch is a project of the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab. It is available for free at http://scratch.mit.edu.

Links

S2JS commends the following links:

Scratch — the definitively best place for kids or adults to learn the basics of computer programming.

W3Schools — the place to go to learn more about HTML, Javascript, CSS or a plethora of other web technologies. Reference source and tutorials.

ScratchX — an introduction to writing ScratchX extensions using Javascript

CodeMahal — a very good set of video tutorials on HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, Unity, MySQL, Arduino and many other topics.

MITS Altair Simulator — for retro individuals interested in experiencing how people taught themselves to program in binary in the 1970's

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