Melodie Deisher's Contact Details

Melodie Deisher's Company Details

Scratch Foundation

Bethesda, MD, US • 50 - 99 Employees
Non-Profit

At the Scratch Foundation, our mission is to ensure that Scratch is available for free, for everyone, so that kids around the world can express their ideas through coding. As champions of the Scratch project, we raise funds to support the project and share stories of innovation, collaboration, and learning within the global Scratch community.We focus on Scratch, the block-based programming language and online community developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab. Scratch makes it easy for young people to create their own interactive media projects -- like games, animations, and simulations -- and then share their creations with others in an active, online community.Scratch is available for free, for everyone. And that's why the Scratch Foundation is so important. Through gifts from individuals, corporations, and foundations, we raise funds to support the entire Scratch ecosystem, including development of new technologies, organization of events, and dissemination of learning resources. We were founded in 2013 as the Code-to-Learn Foundation by Mitchel Resnick, Professor of Learning Research at the MIT Media Lab, and David Siegel, Co-Founder and Co-Chairman of the investment management firm Two Sigma. Mitch and David first met as graduate students in computer science at MIT in the 1980s, and reconnected 25 years later when David's son learned to program with Scratch, developed by Mitch's research group at the MIT Media Lab.In 2015, we changed our name to the Scratch Foundation to reflect our specific focus on Scratch and its dynamic ecosystem of interacting projects (Scratch, ScratchJr, ScratchEd) and events (Scratch Day, Scratch Conference, Scratch Educator Meetups).