On 2017-8-12, finally, 20million users. It's about registered users with Scratch website/community. Congratulations!!
It went more than 10 million users on February last year, and has been growing by 500 to 600 thousands a month, then it's twice now. Increasing by 10 to 20 thousands a day, amazing, isn't it? (Scratch Statistics)
You can code on Scratch by just snapping blocks. It's too simple to start coding on Scratch 2.0 if you visit the site. You can even use cloud storage to hold your projects with your account registered. Yes, many users are using it without their accounts. We have to say "it's at least 20 million" because there are still many Scratch 1.4 users, too.
It is often said that Scratch is for young kids by its look and feel, but don't judge a book by its cover. I believe it has good feel and sense as a programming language. Scratch team says "low floors, high ceilings, and wide walls". You can deeply learn from entry to basic level enough. The huge community has been formed from age 4 to 80 with the peak at 2.10 mil of age 12, 1.92 mil of age 11, and 1.89 mil of age 13.
Interesting article by Dr. John Umekubo:
We can name many reasons why Scratch is good for entry level learners, the community is obviously the big one. Wide range of ages group of 20 million registered users and growing rapidly, 24 million shared projects, and 123 million comments on projects.
Talking about Japan, I'm asking kids in my classes, "Now it has this many users at the website, guess how many Japanese there are." It can be a very good quiz actually, it's too low in number. The answer had been always "it's less than 1%, let's get on board!" for a long time.
Congratulations!! Just got to the 1%! We have a TV program named "Why!? Programming" for one year and a half, and I believe it is a great booster.
I always say to my class "if you make it in English, your audience will be increased by 100 times." Hey, let's get on board first!