Welcome to the distribution center for BYOB (Build Your Own Blocks), an advanced offshoot of Scratch, a visual programming language primarily for kids from the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab. This version, developed by Jens Mönig with design input and documentation from Brian Harvey, is an attempt to extend the brilliant accessibility of Scratch to somewhat older users—in particular, non-CS-major computer science students—without becoming inaccessible to its original audience. BYOB3 adds first class lists, sprites, and procedures to BYOB’s original contribution of custom blocks and recursion.
Also check out Panther, another great advanced spinoff of Scratch with a somewhat different point of view. Panther team member sparks has created a Blocks Library which includes a collection of downloadable BYOB blocks contributed by users. Thanks, sparks!
—Jens and
Brian
Current version: 3.1.1 (19 May 2011)
Please see release notes about localization to other languages, about the debugger, and about the screensaver (included in file README-BYOB.txt in the distribution).
- Windows installer or files only. (Use “files only” if you’re not an Administrator on your computer.)
- Macintosh (drag into your Applications folder, or anywhere).
- One Laptop Per Child
- New: Debian .deb installer courtesy of roijac. Install using GDebi.
- For Linux systems, first install Scratch (available in .deb and .rpm installers). Then…
- For variants of Unix other than Linux it’s a bit harder; first you should install Squeak, then follow the instructions on the Scratch source code page, then copy the media files from the Windows “files only” link above (all but the .exe and .dll files) into the same directory containing the Scratch image.
If you have already installed BYOB 3.1, you can just download these files and replace the ones in your BYOB 3.1 folder with them.
Or if you want to see what it’s all about first, download just the manual (PDF) (included in packages).