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How do you make teachers angry? Take an app out of the App Store

iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad users are used to hearing about new apps showing up in the App Store. It's when they are taken out of the App Store by Apple that things get interesting.

Teachers across the country got a taste of "interesting" last week when Apple removed Scratch Viewer from the App Store. The app is used to display programs that have been written by children in the Scratch programming language, a popular language for teaching kids the basics of computer programming. Scratch was developed by a team at M.I.T Media Lab, and the app was written by John McIntosh of Canadian development firm Smalltalk Consulting, Ltd.

The Computing Education Blog broke the news and received a number of comments protesting Apple's decision. While Apple is remaining quiet on the subject, McIntosh notes that he's in negotiations with the company. Many bloggers are thinking that Apple's excuse for killing Scratch Viewer is that it violates Section 3.3.1 of the company's policy against apps that interpret or execute code. That's the reason Apple is quashing Adobe Flash-based apps.

Mitchel Resnick, who runs the Scratch team at M.I.T., says that he's "disappointed that Apple decided not to allow a Scratch player on the iPhone or iPad" and hopes that "Apple will reconsider its policies so that more kids can experience the joys of creating and sharing with Scratch." The team is planning on writing Scratch authoring tools for iPad, but whether those plans come to fruition is up to Apple.

[via NYT Gadgetwise Blog]