Just reading through the UK Schools Inspectorate's latest ICT report, and came across the following case study, which sounds a lot like Scratch to me:
"An urban primary school had good provision for developing pupils’
programming skills. Two Year 6 pupils attending provision for gifted and
talented pupils at their local secondary school were introduced to a
freeware application which enabled them to design and program a two-
dimensional computer game. Their enthusiasm prompted their class
teacher to download the software and to introduce a new unit of work for
the whole class based around it.
Pupils were asked to design the graphics, layout and functionality of their
own computer game and to write the program to implement their ideas
for its design. Over a series of lessons, pupils used a ‘paint’ application to
design their game backgrounds and sprites. Having completed the
graphical elements, pupils wrote scripts to control movement and
interaction in their games. This required them to learn to use
sophisticated programming constructs such as ‘repeat… until’ and ‘if…
then’ in capturing keyboard input, managing variables and testing whether
particular conditions had been met.
The choice of task and software motivated pupils who were therefore able
to make good progress. Most were able to write a series of executable
instructions to implement the features of their game design. One autistic
pupil excelled at this task and made better progress than his peers. He
made outstanding use of loops, conditional jumps and incremental
counters in his program. His skills exceeded those of his teacher, to whom
he had to explain the principles of what he had done. "
The full report is online at http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/Ofsted-home/Publications-and-research/Browse-all-by/Documents-by-type/Thematic-reports/The-importance-of-ICT-information-and-communication-technology-in-primary-and-secondary-schools-2005-2008/(language)/eng-GB
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