Blink: An Educational Software Debugger for Scratch

Debugging is an important aspect of programming. Most programming languages have some features and tools to facilitate debugging. As the debugging process is also frustrating, it requires good scaffolding, in which a debugger can be a useful tool [3]. Scratch is a visual block-based programming language that is commonly used to teach programming to children, aged 10-14 [4]. It comes with its own integrated development environment (IDE), where children can edit and run their code. This IDE misses some of the tools that are available in traditional IDEs, such as a debugger. In response to this challenge, we developed Blink. Blink is a debugger for Scratch with the aim of being usable to the young audience that typically uses Scratch. We present the currently implemented features of the debugger, and the challenges we faced while implementing those, both from a user-experience standpoint and a technical standpoint.