Coding with scratch is a legendary way to introduce logic, critical thinking, problem-solving, metacognition, and cross-curricular skill development.   The adaptability of this program transcends any content, curricular competency, or core competency.  By diversely engaging students with multiple project types, educators can easily integrate learning standards in numerous ways that appeal to the whole student.  Furthermore, this adaptability would make scaffolding lessons easy because clear access points can be provided to learners.

Unlike traditional programming that disconnects what is happening physically from what is written as code, Scratch enables the user to see, or hear what their program is doing.  Visual cues like motion, color coding, shadow snapping, numeracy, literacy, and shape help students identify where they are mentally in a program.  If problems occur this allows students to trouble shoot, revert to an access point, or provides them with an idea of where to go next.  To differentiate positions within a program further, scratch provides different play through buttons that can be programmed separately.  By breaking down complex programs into multiple simple programs, reinforces readiness and honors students by deconstructing something complex into cognitively manageable chunks.

Even after all this, Scratch takes things to a higher level by adding in communication and collaboration functions.  Through online forums, sharing, and remixing students and teachers alike can learn the necessary skills to deepen their learning, problem solve difficulties, collaborate with others in the community to make something new and fun or lift other Scratch users up.

Taking scratch into a classroom would require a reasonable time investment, to set students up with the tools to operate the program, but beyond that adaptations can be worked through in real time to meet learner needs.  On that note, during a practicum session simply teaching students about programming and Scratch could be a great series of lessons.  Assuming the series involved teaching the online communication and collaborative functions, teaming students up to program an interactive story with, characters, sounds, and animations sounds like brilliant fun.  By adapting grade eight English competencies and content, we could explore the dynamics of story collaboratively, build reading, writing, oral and metacognitive strategies all while learning language features, structures, and conventions.