Nothing to install, nothing to buy
Scratch is free and runs in a web browser. Any laptop or Chromebook from the last decade is enough.
Advaslearning Hub · Scratch · For parents
A parent's guide
Scratch is how an 8-year-old writes a working computer program before they can touch-type. Instead of typing instructions, your child drags coloured blocks together — and a game, a story or an animation comes out the other end. This page explains what they learn, how long it takes, how they are assessed, and where they go afterwards.
What Scratch is
Scratch was made by MIT to teach children to program. The instructions are physical-looking blocks that only click together in ways that make sense, so a child cannot write a program that is broken by a missing semicolon or a misspelled word. What they can still get wrong — and what the course is really about — is the thinking: what should happen, in what order, and what to do when it does not work.
Scratch is free and runs in a web browser. Any laptop or Chromebook from the last decade is enough.
The projects are built around Malaysian life — a pasar pagi soundscape, catching roti canai, a Hari Raya open house, a Malaysia trivia quiz — so the work feels like theirs.
Lessons come in runs of five to eight that build one project together. At the end of each run your child has a game they can play and show you — 30 of them across the course.
The road map
Each level is 48 one-hour lessons and ends with an assessment and a certificate. Levels are taken in order, and a child normally moves up once the level below is passed.
Foundation · 48 lessons · 48 hours
Your child meets the Scratch screen and gets something moving in the first lesson. Everything is drag-and-drop, so there is no typing and no spelling to get wrong.
Intermediate · 48 lessons · 48 hours
This is where a project stops being a cartoon and starts being a game. The program begins to make choices — if this happens, do that — and characters start to notice each other.
Advanced · 48 lessons · 48 hours
Level 3 is the turning point. Your child starts storing lists of information, writing their own reusable instructions, and meeting the first named algorithms — the same ones taught in secondary-school Computer Science.
Expert · Project · 48 lessons · 48 hours
The final level is about finishing things properly. Bigger projects, drawing and music, and the habits of sharing work publicly — writing instructions, crediting other people, and taking feedback.
Your child does not have to finish all four levels to move on. Many students cross into Python or robotics after Level 2 or Level 3, once they are comfortable with loops, decisions and variables. Level 4 is for the child who wants to keep going and leave with a real portfolio.
Time commitment
One lesson a week is the normal pace. At that rate a level takes about a school year, and the full programme spans roughly four years — which is why the course is written to grow with your child from 8 to 12.
| Level | Lessons | Class hours | Assessment | At one lesson a week |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Level 1 | 48 | 48 hours | 2.5 hours | About one school year |
| Level 2 | 48 | 48 hours | 2.5 hours | About one school year |
| Level 3 | 48 | 48 hours | 2.5 hours | About one school year |
| Level 4 | 48 | 48 hours | 2.5 hours | About one school year |
| Whole programme | 192 | 192 hours | 10 hours | About four years |
Intensive and holiday schedules run faster than one lesson a week — ask your centre what it currently offers.
Assessment & certification
Each level ends with two papers, sat in the centre. Together they are worth 100 marks. The first paper checks that your child understands what they have been doing; the second checks that they can still do it on their own, from a blank screen.
90 minutes · 70 marks. Twenty multiple-choice questions on how programs behave, then three short build tasks where your child is shown a picture of what the finished thing should do and has to make it.
60 minutes · 30 marks. One project brief, built from an empty Scratch file and handed in as a real project file. It opens only once Paper 1 has been passed, so nobody sits it unprepared.
Before the real thing, the teacher can unlock a full practice paper — different questions, slightly harder — as many times as it helps. It never counts towards anything.
Every level has a second, equivalent paper. A level that is not passed the first time can be sat again without repeating the whole level.
Passing a level earns a dated Advaspire certificate carrying your child's name, the level, the grade and a unique certificate number — issued as a print-ready PDF.
Marking is done by a person, not a machine. The multiple-choice section is marked automatically, but every build task and every project is opened and marked by your child's teacher against a published mark scheme — which is how a project can score well for being solved in an unusual way.
What they take away
Most children who take this course will not grow up to be programmers, and that is fine. These are the habits the course builds that apply wherever they end up.
“Make a game” is impossible. “Make the cat move, then make the food fall, then count the catches” is not. Your child practises that split every single lesson.
A program that misbehaves does not tell you off — it just misbehaves. Children learn to look calmly for the cause instead of guessing, and to change one thing at a time.
Later levels teach sketching a project on paper first — what characters exist, what each one does. It is the same habit as planning an essay.
Projects run across five to eight lessons, so your child cannot finish one in a single sitting. Coming back to unfinished, imperfect work is a large part of the point.
Every finished project is presented and, from Level 2, written up with instructions for someone else to use. Being able to describe your own work is a skill in itself.
The projects are theirs — their characters, their jokes, their choice of music. Children defend and improve work they feel ownership of.
The school connection
Scratch is not a school subject, but a surprising amount of it is. These are the direct overlaps.
| In Scratch | At school | When |
|---|---|---|
| Positioning characters on a grid with x and y | Coordinates and the number line, including negatives | Level 1 |
| Turning a character by a set number of degrees | Angles, turns and directions | Level 1 |
| Scores, timers and speed that go up and down | Arithmetic, negative numbers, simple ratio | Levels 1–2 |
| “If this is true, do that” rules | Logical reasoning; conditions and truth | Level 2 |
| Searching a list, and putting a list in order | Algorithms — linear search and bubble sort, both on the SPM / IGCSE Computer Science syllabus | Level 3 |
| Writing a reusable instruction of your own | Functions and procedures — the core idea of all programming | Level 3 |
| Random numbers, remainders and rounding | Probability and number operations | Levels 3–4 |
The blocks are not a toy version of the real thing — they are the real thing with the typing removed. A child who has used repeat 10 in Scratch is meeting an old friend when they write for i in range(10): in Python two years later. That recognition is the whole reason we start here.
After Scratch
Scratch is the on-ramp, not the destination. Once a child is comfortable with loops, decisions and variables — usually by the end of Level 2 or Level 3 — they are ready to move across to typed code or to robotics, and many take a second course alongside Scratch rather than after it.
The usual next step. Everything Scratch taught in blocks — loops, decisions, lists — now typed out. An 8-level path to six international Python Institute certifications.
Still drag-and-drop, but the code now drives a robot your child has built. The gentlest move out of Scratch for a child who likes making physical things.
Typed code that lights LEDs, reads sensors and moves motors. Good for a child who asks how things actually work.
A pocket-sized computer that can be programmed in blocks or in code. A good sideways step if your child is younger and not ready to type yet.
Further along the path there is web development, game development with Godot, and exam preparation for Cambridge IGCSE and AQA GCSE Computer Science — so a child who starts with Scratch at 8 has a continuous route all the way to a recognised qualification at 16.
Common questions
No. Scratch is built from coloured blocks that are dragged together with the mouse, so nothing has to be typed or spelled correctly for a program to work. Reading a short instruction is enough. This is exactly why we start children here rather than with typed code.
Your child builds the game rather than plays one. Making a game work means putting steps in the right order, testing it, finding the one step that is wrong, and fixing it — and then doing it again when the next thing breaks. That loop is the actual skill, and games are simply the most motivating thing to point it at.
Any laptop or Chromebook with a web browser. Nothing is bought and nothing is installed — Scratch runs on a free website made by MIT. If your internet is unreliable, there is a free offline version that works identically. Speakers or headphones are nice for the sound lessons but not required.
A short, optional extension at the end of each lesson — usually “add one more thing to what you built today”. Nothing is written on paper. A child who does none of it still completes the level; a child who does it arrives with something to show.
Every lesson page stays available in the Hub, so a missed lesson can be read and rebuilt at home. Lessons come in runs of five to eight that build one project together, so the teacher will usually place a returning student at the start of the next run rather than mid-project.
Yes. Every lesson your child sits is published on this site, and the full lesson-by-lesson plan and syllabus are linked at the bottom of this page. Assessment results, marks and certificates are recorded per level and can be shown to you by your centre.
There is a practice paper before the real one, which the teacher can unlock as many times as it is useful and which never counts towards anything. If the real paper is not passed, a second version of it exists for a retake. The aim is that a certificate means something, not that children fail.
No — Scratch itself has no external exam board, so nobody can offer one. Our certificate is an Advaspire certificate, backed by our own marked papers. External certification starts in the courses after Scratch: Python, for example, leads to the international Python Institute certifications.
Every one of the 192 lessons is published and readable. Nothing about this course is hidden behind an enrolment form.