Scratch

Hi Dave,

you can specify in the .ini file which drives you want to be visible for the kids in your school network. Check out the technical appendix on page 20 of the Scratch reference guide in the support section. I hope this solves your problem.

Another way to let your students use Scratch in a locked down school network is to allow them to start it locally from their own flash drives. Instead of downloading and installing the ScratchInstaller you can just download the "files-only" version, unzip it to a portable drive and start Scratch directly from there. That way, if the network is really secure (and not just obscured) students can save their projects only to their portable devices.

I really hope you can work out something with your network administrator, so that your students will be able to use Scratch in school!

> I suspect this problem exists in many schools

I can name a couple of hundred in my vicinity. Sorry folks but relatively common Windows domain lockdown doesn't like or clashes badly with:

-- D-I-Y file open/save dialogs that bypass the policy you've set for the Windows one.
-- Option to save things somewhere under the Program Files\<appname> especially on a multi-user machine.
-- Option to save things on the desktop.
-- Running apps from pensticks.

Most of the MS "logo compliance" rules for these kind of things turned up almost a decade ago and there were *very* good reasons for them. I definitely don't like criticising free-lunches, but I can't see any credible way to deploy this on a typical school system unless I can explicitly say a) where the user can save & subsequently open projects/resources, b) where samples projects et al can be loaded from. Hiding drives isn't enough.