Scratch as a computational modelling tool for teaching physics

The Scratch online authoring tool, which features a simple programming language that has been adapted to primary and secondary students, is being used more and more in schools as it offers students and teachers the opportunity to use a tool to build scientific models and evaluate their behaviour, just as can be done with computational modelling programs. In this article, we briefly discuss why Scratch could be a useful tool for computational modelling in the primary or secondary physics classroom, and we present practical examples of how it can be used to build a model.