An insightful online webinar titled “Online Learning? No More Head Scratching – Quizzes Design Using Scratch” was organised by UTAR Faculty of Information and Communication Technology (FICT), in collaboration with Division of Programme Promotion (DPP) and Department of Soft Skills and Competency (DSSC) on 27 June 2020 via Google Meet. The invited speaker was FICT lecturer Ts Dr Ooi Chek Yee.

The objective of the webinar was to introduce the UTAR IT programmes to secondary school students, as well as guiding the students to create a simple programming project using Scratch Programming platform.

Scratch is a programming platform for beginners where the young students can program and share their stories, games and animation with people from all over the world. Scratch is taught and used in schools, colleges, as well as other public institutions. With Scratch, the students are able to think creatively when expressing their ideas, as well as learning how to use coding to project their ideas to life.

Dr Ooi said, “Scratch is a programming language that is suitable for beginners who are still learning the fundamental programming. Besides, the online Scratch Programming enables its user to write program scripts online using web browsers.” He also added that the Online Scratch can be accessed through the following website: https://scratch.mit.edu/.

Furthermore, he also explained the advantages of using the Scratch platform. According to him, the programme is free and it is convenient to use because its structures include all necessary programming techniques needed by computer beginners. Besides, he also advised the students to download Scratch from the following website: https://scratch.mit.edu/download.

In addition, he also said that the students from primary school and secondary school are encouraged to use Scratch as a beginning platform to learn programming and he also hoped that this sharing session will motivate the students to further their studies in Computer Programming field, as well as exploring the essential needs to learn IT programming in this 21st century.

Reaching at the end of the webinar, Dr Ooi displayed the demo version of a game he created using Scratch to the participants. The webinar then ended with an interactive Q&A session. The webinar attracted 170 participants and received a total of 174 views.