ScratchGen
Project to research asset and code generation for Scratch projects using available APIs.
Project stage: pre-larval
There are several open source projects aimed at converting Scratch projects to other forms (like JavaScript) and to read the scratch project file for analysis or re-rendering the blocks in the scratch forums. Also, there are a handful that focus on the other direction: building up a scratch project from another representation, such as Tosh, a text version of the scratch block language.
As of version 3, the Scratch project format is well published, understood and the source code for working with it is open source. The Scratch code itself may be the best API to generate code and other project assets.
General Info
Scratch project files, .sb3 files, are a zip file with assets and a json file.
The official Scratch REST API provides access to project metadata, not the Scratch project files themselves. Community members have created many projects to fill that void.
The json elements closely represent the blocks with interconnections such as parent-child relationships and next-block relationships referenced via arbitrary, generated GUIDs.
Scratch 3 is built in JavaScript using Blockly for the GUI. Earlier versions were built on Flash (Scratch 2.0) or Smalltalk (Scratch 1.4). Therefore, libraries that read or write earlier version scratch projects are not suitable for generating Scratch 3 projects directly. The Scratch 3 codebase has carefully handled backward compatibility such that projects written for previous versions of Scratch can be loaded but only if they are freshsly saved with Scratch 3 will the project files be available in the 3.0 format.
Scratch MIT Official
The Scratch Foundation and Life-Long Kindergarten (LLK) at MIT Media Lab seem to each have a github entity for the same group and their repositories appear to be highly interlinked: LLK and scratchfoundation.
The JavaScript codebases use the CommonJS module system: const foo = require('foo');
scratchfoundation
- scratch-blocks Scratch Blocks is a library for building creative computing interfaces.
- scratch-vm Virtual Machine used to represent, run, and maintain the state of programs for Scratch 3.0
- scratch-render WebGL-based rendering engine for Scratch 3.0
- scratch-paint
- scratch-svg-renderer
- scratch-semantic-release-config
- scratch-renovate-config
- scratch-storage
- scratch-audio
- scratch-parser Validation and parsing for Scratch
.sb2projects - scratch-render-fonts
- scratch-asset-types
- scratch-sb1-converter Convert Scratch .sb files (for Scratch 1) to Scratch 2 (.sb2) in JS.
- ... more rando stuff
LLK
- scratch-www Standalone web client for Scratch
- scratch-gui Graphical User Interface for creating and running Scratch 3.0 projects.
- scratch-l10n localisation, international translations
- scratch-resources Source files and images for translators to translate Scratch materials
- eslint-config-scratch Shareable ESLint config for Scratch
- scratch-desktop Scratch 3.0 as a self-contained desktop application
- scratch2-project-analyzer Tools for analyzing Scratch 2.0 projects
- scratchjr-website Code for the Scratch Jr Website
- scratch-analysis Analysis tool for summarizing the structure, composition, and complexity of Scratch programs.
- scratch-link Device interoperability layer for Windows and MacOS
- paper.js LLK fork of js vector graphics scripting library
- ...several other component and utility projects.
In some cases there are sometimes thousands of forks of these repositories.
TurboWarp
Modified version of Scratch 3 with faster performance etc.
Dr Scratch & Hairball
cdchushig/drscratchv3 seems to be the best fork deriving from the
static analysis tools DrScratch and Hairball. Apparently starved for funding to pay the heroku bills and
stuck in eternal beta, drscratch.org does work to some extent as of April 2023 if you upload
the .sb3 project file rather than expect it to be extract that for you from the scratch project page URL.
There are several other splinter repos for older versions: drscratchv3, drscratchv2, drscratch_2019 etc.
Hairball seems to be the original work here and some hairball code still lives on inside Dr Scratch. The github fork network is somewhat unruly. hairball-demo shows the original context and is written up in an academic paper by Bryce Boe in 2013.
The tldr for the paper is that existing static analysis tools relied upon for academic assessment and (somewhat optimistically) "for students" were not amenable to the visual programming environment, so like nearly every other aspect of the software engineering toolchain and ecosystem, visual programming languages force them to be adapted or rewritten.
Tosh & Kurt
tjvr/kurt is a Python 2 API for parsing Scratch 1.4 and 2.0 files, written by the same developer (aka Blob8108) as Tosh and Tosh2 which are text modes for Scratch implemented in JS.
Tosh3 appears to be inspired by rather than derived from the above.
Misc
- getsb3 API for downloading scratch projects in sb3 format. JavaScript, Docker.
- scratchblocks renders a faithful view of a scratch program's block shapes. Seems to be view only, not edit.
- sb-edit Some limited ability to download and modify scratch project files and assets.
- Xeltalliv/ScratchTools misc standalone utilities for Scratch 3 written in JavaScript.
- MegaApuTurkUltra/ScratchTools follower stats and audio visualisation for Scratch 2 written in Java.