Scratch is a visual programming language developed by MIT. It has become popular in
education circles as a way of encouraging youngsters to learn programming. Scratch in-
cludes its own development environment, like IDLE for Python, but programming is car-
ried out by dragging and dropping programming structures rather than simply typing text.
Figure 12-1 shows a section of one of the sample programs provided with Scratch for
the game Pong, where a ball is bounced on a paddle.