Those of you who've been following Scratch may have noticed at the end of Jan 2013, the MIT team released a test (beta) 2.0 version that they plan for official release mid-2013 to supersede version 1.4, last updated in 2009. Version 2.0 will be completely re-written in Adobe Flash, a barrier for use on iOS systems, but the good news is that the MIT team plans to develop an HTML viewer. Check out the details here.

And, there's more good Scratch news ... Pluralsight, a training leader in the IT industry, just released an official "Scratch" training course for free to the public. It's a self-paced 4.5 hr course targeted to kids and adult beginners, complete with review quizzes and homework. I took it last week and was impressed and learned some cool tricks I wasn't familiar with, like how to add notes to your code, and that you can drag and drop blocks from character to character to copy over animation sequences. And the course does a very good job explaining "variables", a tricky concept for beginners. I'll cover them in my next video.