Has early Scratch experience led to fulfilling careers? | Hacker News Reader

Has early Scratch experience led to fulfilling careers?

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124 pointsilamont99 comments

I worked with some of the folks who introduced coding into school districts way back when that movement started, so I have a bit of inside knowledge.

The biggest anecdote I'd share is that learning to code as early as 1st grade unexpectedly led to children taking the ability to troubleshoot problems and using it across all their subjects in school. They started to treat struggles in other classes as debugging assignments: "What went wrong? What do I need to fix?" Their entire attitude changed from pass/fail into optimization. It has led to academic improvements across entire school districts, which was not at all expected but was a delightful surprise.

So the question posed seems fairly irrelevant to me. Maybe some of those kids grew up to be coders, maybe they did not. Either way, it helped their education.

it's not an irrelevant question if helping kids find fulfilling careers is the goal. what you are saying is that scratch is worthwhile even if that isn't the goal, which i think is awesome in its own right.

"It has led to academic improvements across entire school districts"

This sounds amazing! Is there anything more you can share about this? Or any articles/papers about the results or how you supported kids to progress with Scratch?

It's not always your first exposure that you later identify as a catalyst.

I'm an American that took a C++ class in Europe when I was 13 (forward thinking school in retrospect). But when asked, I usually say scripting RS bots was what got me into the field, because I had fun and it was more memorable.

But would I have chosen to do that had I no idea what coding was? Maybe not...

I very first got into programming by trying to fix a graphic adventure game that somehow was released with a pretty clear syntax error. This was back in the VIC-20 days. Really, for the first while it was about the games ... tweaking them, altering them, and later writing them.

The actual programming was always a means to that gaming end back then and not the end in itself. So in that sense I can completely relate to where you're coming from.

Over a couple years of that, it started to dawn on me that the programming itself had a power and interest all its own worth pursuing.

But I think if it was dropped in front of me as something I ought to do, no matter how dressed up in "fun" it was, it would have set off my non-conformist predispositions a little too much.

but even today, don't you write code to solve a problem? to fix a bug in an application? to achieve something?

feels to me not that different. just that the targets are no longer games but other kinds of applications.

Of course. But still it's not the same.

What's different is that I found the journey can be just as interesting and engaging as the destination. I read papers, books, and even spend time around here... not because the solutions require it, but because I care about the craft and the process itself.

So yes, the resulting solution is the prime mover, but the process of finding the solutions is no longer just a means to the end, it's part of the motivation of being involved in the profession at all.

Absolutely agreed.

I had a trash-80 in the early 80s and used to copy BASIC from magazines, and then in the mid 90s I bought a book with a CD in it that taught me how to set up perl-based e-commerce store, which I set up for my mom's retail shop. Neither of those got me interested in programming.

The event in my life that got me there was around 2000, when I bought a Cold Fusion 4 book off of a street vendor - literally on Wall Street - and I spent my evenings building an intranet that replaced the Access database that my company shipped and merged across the country every Friday.

That's when I got hooked, and started building my career (and hobby).

Not sure if something like Scratch would have gotten me there (LOGO definitely didn't) - but I imagine the level of comfort I had with computers at a young age kept me in the vicinity that eventually got me there.

This really made me think about what got me interested in programming and I have no idea. In HS, I had a Physics teacher who had a TRS-80 (Model 3, I think) and he would let us use it during Lunch for whatever. But I was already interested at that point. We had a "programming" class where we programmed some kind of computer in some unknown language, but again, I was already interested in programming before then: that was just the outlet.

Really have me wondering now.

To your point I think I'll adjust what I was saying a bit. I was definitely interested. I always thought it would be cool to be able to program. There was good media to make it intriguing from afar. But I had nobody in my life to help me understand.

My mom did a great job making sure I always had a computer but she didn't know enough about them to help.

Elementary school put us in front of them and taught us how to type and let us play oregon trail and print shop, but that wasn't it. And my high school has us programming in Pascal. Meh.

When I was in my 20s, in a new city, working to pay my own way I found the determination needed to teach myself. It absolutely helped that the internet was becoming this wealth of information for the self-taught. That was my launch pad. I definitely think everything else helped get me there

I always love hearing from other people who started with computers by typing in basic from magazines.

For me it was a TI 99/4a and typing in code got me completely hooked on programming. Whether it was a game, a 4 bit cpu simulator of some sort (memories are vague) or a word search solver didn’t matter. It all felt magical.

Logo did nothing for me. It never gave me that sense of satisfaction that I got from writing in basic or assembly.

Yeah it was a Texas Instruments calculator for me too.

I feel like the baseline teaching is trivially necessary, and should simply be assumed in these kinds of assessments. Getting someone to invest themselves emotionally into a subject is both infinitely harder and valuable, and should always be the focal point.

That is, the true “origin” isn’t worth much — the origin of interest is whatever kicked off the feedback loop of joy —> learning —> joy (in my own case, it was learning djikstra’s algorithm)

> not always your first exposure

Great point. How many professional sports players credit their elementary aged PE classes to their success in sport (as opposed to say crediting a high school coach)?

Progressive, unbridled access and exposure is key.

Same. Got into scripting SCAR and hanging out on the Kaitnieks forums. Delphi Pascal or something right?

Indeed! Fond memories of that orange bulldozer... And lots of lamenting that I was a little too late for the storied AutoRune days :)

Ive been volunteering with a foster kid for a number of years now (8 -> 10 year old) . We would build robotic kits, Lego and work through origami books. If problems came up, most of time he would say 'it's too hard' and give up.

I introduced him to scratch the other month. I have loved his excitement when he builds the simplest things. I've seen him run into problems where I thought his attitude of 'it's too hard' would come to the surface. He tackled them head on, figured out where the bug was and supplied a fix.

I hope he has a fulfilling career in CS or sciences in general. So I sincerely hope scratch and this experience builds up his confidence and beak the cycle of poverty and drug abuse

I was a naysayer before I had kids, too. I now am able to get a first person view of Scratch usage through my child who likes the platform very much.

What's missing in a lot of these discussions about Scratch efficacy is the community aspect. Kids like getting a response in the comments section from their peers and many of the alternatives proposed don't have that. Without an active community, a lot of kids might never use the alternative despite being "better". In the case of Scratch (unlike Khan academy, which he completed also), he keeps using it, keeps trying things and keeps coming back because of the rewarding community interactions.

My kids showed more interest in BASIC GOTO 10 on an emulator than school Scratch.

I think it is a decent programming paradigm but really just teach 6502 binary code entered by flipping switches and blinking lights and let only the children who love it go on to learn programming and computer science.

Mine too!

A while back, I powered up an Atari 800, and she was fascinated.

    10 Input "What's your name?", N$
    20 Print "Hi, ";N$

She was asking questions, trying out things. Something about that simple, imperative, dynamic type of language connects in ways that most conceptually purer and more powerful languages just do not. Python was close, but then it swerved.

I loved Scratch as a kid and got really deep into it. Not sure if I could call myself a "success story" but it did get me much more comfortable with programming!

Before Scratch I think the two biggest barriers in my childhood programming experiments were 1) Remembering all the different syntax and function names, and 2) Being bored by the basic CLI programs that all tutorials started with. Scratch helped with both of those. It had a palette with all possible commands available to you, it was impossible to make syntax errors, and it was visually-oriented so I could dive right into making games. Lowering those barriers helped me learn how to structure code in a fun way, so when I did eventually go back to the "real" languages I felt much less lost.

I also remember really loving the social features, getting comments on my work, and collaborating with people.

I'd love to see more experimentation in this area, there's definitely potential for a more modernized educational language that builds on these ideas.

I can say it has for me. I spent a couple years on scratch as a kid before moving on to other languages, and it helped me really get into programming.

My hobby projects are almost always video games to this day, partially because of it. I even built my first compiler/interpreter on there before I knew what those words meant, and got exposed to lots of math that I otherwise wouldn't have seen until high school. Being able to easily discover what others were doing, and learn from their projects, helped me out a lot.

It will always be special to me, as I'm sure BASIC and such are to others.

I understand why people value the code John Carmack has released but I do not understand why people value his public statements.

"eventually id Tech 5 is going to be open source also. This is still the law of the land at id"[0]

"Great! I think Microsoft has been a good parent company for gaming IPs"[1]

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20081003111457/http://www.linuxg...

[1] https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1308069857913720832

He's been clearly corrupted by money, long ago.

I think it's just typical c-suite ego. get enough success stories under your belt and suddenly every thing you've ever thought is, as Eggers once titled, a Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (even the stuff that has little to nothing to do with what you've been successful at - in this case knowing how software works vs knowing how pedagogy works)

Scratch's problem is ecosystem. It develops UX for children who are still early to the keyboard but children learn so fast, and at some point they get past the high friction stage and end up in a desert.

For my tutoring job one of the things I teach is Scratch but I do so very rarely (most of my lessons are for Python). So far, I’ve had two Scratch students that have stuck out to me:

- Student A started with Scratch, but within 2-3 lessons I convinced his mother to switch him over to Python. He wasn’t my best student, but he was very open to trying things and had a fun time coding. Plus it was really great to see him go from zero to competent within a short period of time. Personally I think it’s 50/50 that he continues coding on his own, but I hope the skills I taught him (not the exact syntax) will stick with in some form or another

- Student J is far more interesting to me as he’s not interested in making games or coding. Rather, he prefers making animations and really likes the Scratch interface. While his animations aren’t the highest quality stuff I’ve come across, I really admire his attitude of making one animation per lesson and trying all kinds of stuff vs sticking to just one thing.

Personally I think scratch is a decent start for teaching kids to code, but I wouldn’t recommend it for that purpose. If you want to teach your kids to code, I think it’s best to start with a “real” language. That said, I think it’s a very good introduction for animation and graphical projects without all the complexity of a game engine.

Where are you likely to hear a "Success Story" especially an adult who likely moved on from Scratch since they were... what.. 10 years old. Perhaps younger.

Truth is you are either going to be interested in programming.. or not. The question is how the brain triggers to get you interested.

I could argue the starting point (for me) was Visual Studio 6.0. (1998)

Or.. maybe.. it was Turbo Pascal and Turbo C. (1997)

Or.. maybe.. it was Quake and QuakeC. (1997)

Or.. maybe.. it was the Open University books laying around. (1995)

Or.. maybe.. it was watching DooM for the first time. (1993)

Or.. maybe.. it was playing the Amiga at my friends house (1991)

Or.. maybe.. it was playing the Amstrad at my friends house (1989-1990)

Or.. maybe.. it was the BBC Microcomputer I never got to touch in school. I saw others using it, though. (1988?)

Or.. maybe.. it was watching a zx spectrum advert around 1985. A little toddler pointing at the screen and expressing his interest to Mum. I loved that advert (and actually came across it again recently on YT) -- is this the REAL starting point?

Point is... Scratch is likely a great starting point for kids today. For some they might move to Python or something and forgetting where they started. Like me, they probably had other things before Scratch that peaked their interest.

"I wonder how they made 'X'"

scratch was the trigger for me just as you say. I was turning 11 when we used it at school (28 now). A year or so later I was reading Java for Dummies and making little tools on the TI-84. Then learning C++ and python on a raspberry pi 1B. I’m grateful to that computer lab teacher who thought scratch was worth teaching.

I still see picture books as an introductory path to literacy for kids, but unlike posting fan fiction on AO3, I have never heard a “success story”, where someone credits their early experience with picture books as key to a fulfilling career. Anyone?

The snarky analogy doesn’t really really work because plenty of people actually do credit video games for their successful career, myself included. Thanks, Roblox.

And plenty of great authors start with fanfic. Like actually. But apologies the snark landed that way. I was not intending to diminish people learning via game modding at all.

What I found irritating in the post is the premise that what we put in front of kids should be judged by counts of attributions to career success.

> What I found irritating in the post is the premise that what we put in front of kids should be judged by counts of attributions to career success.

For a start, that's effectively the premise it's sold on. And for another thing, if it's not contributing to the kind of thinking that would help with that job, what is it other than another esoteric game?

There are many things that no one will think to later attribute to “career success” that were in fact foundational to their learning and development.

In my experience it’s designed around a make/build/experiment pedagogical approach, not as a bootcamp system to get kids into programming careers

I'm guessing that Roblox will be responsible for more people learning programming than essentially any other single entity

I still see mashed peas as an introductory path to solid food for kids, but unlike attending Montessori schools, I have never seen a "success story", where someone credits their early experience with avant-garde curriculum as a key to a fulfilling career. Anyone?

Same distance, from A to B to C. Thanks for wasting all of our time with you comment.

The absurdity is the point. Comparing the merits of scratch vs game modding in children’s eventual programming career success is such a silly overly serious adult thing to do. If kids experience fun and exploration while learning along the way, that’s what matters.

Dolly Parton's Imagination Library project had to have had some justification.

I think picture books are not the same as Scratch. Scratch is much farther along that process. An equivalent might be comic books or graphic novels, which people actually do attribute a love of either as an introduction to fulfilling careers.

For me, yes. I was introduced to Scratch on a field trip as a 5th grader and went home and tinkered with it, making a bunch of games. I later got a Lego Mindstorms kit. As a teenager I learned Java through the Minecraft server modding community and YouTube. I'm now a software engineer for my career.

Very similar path for me too, though was all in High School/College courses for me.

Basic HTML class -> Scratch Android dev -> Java course that used Lego Mindstorms -> Exploring Minecraft mods in free time -> Realized I don't really like Java

I spent my childhood using crappy 4K versions of BASIC. Love my career. Still get to do everything from embedded nonsense to database architecture.

My son started on Scratch, then Minecraft, and 15 years later he's working on designing jigs in parametric CAD for space lasers. I'm sure he'll be fine.

It might still be a bit too early to tell I would have thought - Scratch 2.0 was released in 2013 so a child who was 7 when that was released would only be 20 now. It might also be hard to disentangle from the effect of AI on early careers in programming these days.

I have mixed feelings about Scratch but it does engage children more than most other tools out there and I suspect its value isn't so much for the children who would have become programmers come what may, but in terms of increasing a baseline understanding of some programming concepts in the more general population and helping some children discover they enjoy programming who never would have done otherwise.

Yes, I credit Scratch as leading to my fulfilling career. I made so many games and simulations! Spending hours over the summer creating operating systems, animations, puzzles, and so on.

This was when Scratch was still a downloaded program. The community was also really encouraging back then - you'd see adults and kids commenting on new projects and cheering people on, remixing, and sharing knowledge.

Yes!! I am a case of this!

I started on Scratch when I was 7 years old, and although I'm not mainly going into programming, I'm very passionate about IT infrastructure and cybersecurity. I absolutely credit Scratch for my interest in computers and systems. I'm one year away from graduating college in IT and am currently working in IT. https://dreamstation.systems/professional/

Feel free to ask me anything

My kids are learning on Scratch. 10 and 9 years old, been doing it for a few years at this point. The older one has had the opportunity to switch to Python but keeps going back to Scratch. He can make less trivial things than I used to make with Mark Overmars' GameMaker when I was a teen, and I'm now a C++ developer. So it would seem like a high possibility. He's done pathfinding algorithms, raycasting, file loading/saving, etc. The other kid likes it for creating artwork.

I was housemates with a couple with a kid. The kid learned Scratch first, and made some surprisingly sophisticated apps in that semester (or two).

By now he’s moved on to textual languages (not yet old enough for a career), but Scratch was engaging and gave him a good start.

I think it's the same story as with Snap Circuits for learning electronics, or baking soda + citric acid "chemistry sets". Many parents really wanted their kids to have a STEM career, and so we lowered the bar to the point where STEM-shaped educational activities are accessible to any kid. But because there's no bar to entry, playing with these toys doesn't reliably translate into motivation to really learn electronics, programming, or something like that. That motivation still manifests only in a small percentage of kids. Maybe we're making that percentage go up slightly, but it's a small effect.

FWIW, it's not exactly a new phenomenon. Two decades before Scratch, many schools were using Logo to teach kids programming, probably with similar success rates. Stuff like that is probably good even if it doesn't lead to a STEM "success story". It makes kids actively participate instead of scrolling Tiktok all day.

I was inspired to learn programming when I first saw Logo on my school computer in the 80s. Till then I thought computers were something that only offices had and grown ups used. Not sure how any of this can be measured at scale but I'm sure some nontrivial % of students got into computers at an early age thanks to these tools.

All it takes is for someone who knows how to make regular tech bend down and say "this is for me." not to dumb it down beyond recognition.

Logo was a Programming Language, not a blunt-edged primary-colored disposable plastic blinkenlight.

Snap Circuits are just ingredients - or a way to develop fine motor skills with something that is entertaining for a parent.

You wire them up to something else then blow their mind by programming an ESP32 to be a switch with a touchscreen.

If the parent knows electronics, that's already a pretty good predictor that the kid will learn it too. But in the absence of that, the kit itself doesn't teach much. The instructions don't really explain the circuits, they just show you how to put together colorful blocks.

If the kid lacks curiosity that’s not something a kit can fix.

“Why??!” doesn’t come in a bottle, and that’s the X factor here.

You have to have a certain grit to really succeed in STEM. The key lie of the kits is that... it's not easy. If having things be easy is your thing, then this is not something you want to do. And I don't mean 'easy' by 'not requiring work'. There are many easy things that are themselves lucrative careers because they require work that people don't want to do / aren't good at. STEM is 'hard' in the sense that there's not always an obvious next step. For example, right now, I have started a side business developing property. That's its own adventure, completely the opposite of STEM in many ways... the way forward is always pretty obvious. There's no random 'bug' or 'error' that happens without explanation. The difficulty in that field is simply execution. STEM is not like that. You can be a great executor, but if you don't know what to work on, then there's no point. Not sure if I'm doing a good job explaining the difference, but it's how I view it.

That being said, I use scratch to teach my kids programming. While computers are only a small piece of STEM, I think the zero marginal cost nature of it which allows unbounded trial and error is an amazing learning tool.

>That motivation still manifests only in a small percentage of kids. Maybe we're making that percentage go up slightly, but it's a small effect.

Yeah its not exactly predictable.

I know very few people in my high school who even attempted technology careers, and all of them from my year who tried, other than myself and one other, went in with scholarships. And all of them, left when the scholarship money ended. Its literally the 2 of us out of 6, and we are the 2 who werent funded by scholarships.

And one of the blokes who bailed was consistently turning in better quality coding assignments, and also had access to a pre uni IT pathway, and was studying for it. He just got bored and wandered off when no one wanted to finance it anymore (and this is australia, where full time students of that age are already eligible for money)

My impression of Australia (as an American who is living in New Zealand) is that there isn't the same financial benefit to working as a software engineer vs other careers as there is in the US, and there isn't the same stigma towards the trades.

We very almost followed the UK into a trade armageddon, sending all our kids to do tertiary subjects. But somehow we sort of lucked out of it. Tradespeople ended up being extremely well awarded anyway. Electricians especially do really well.

But yeah we push out a lot of engineers, just mostly Mining, Electrical, Structural. Much fewer software engineers.

This is like asking if anyone in the Tour de France has credited training wheels for their success.

I would never credit my Visual Basic class in middle school for my career but it did introduce me to a lot of things I didn’t know about before, and certainly wasn’t a net negative.

More like asking if anyone in the Tour de France has credited a win to early use ofone of those little Fred Flinstone-style kiddie cars where they use their feet on the ground for locomotion.

More apt than you intended. Training wheels actually make it harder to learn how to ride a bike. I think this is what Carmack is implying about Scratch. I'm sure he would rate VB much higher than Scratch as an intro to programming.

> This is like asking if anyone in the Tour de France has credited training wheels for their success.

And yet every F1 driver credits gokarting for their career. Laying the groundwork in your early years makes a big difference. My career would be very different without Logo and Turbo Pascal

I think there's a misplaced focus on "first" experiences being optimal in some way.

Whether a kid is going to take to programming or not is pretty unlikely to change based on whether they're introduced to a block-based or text-based language, or whether it's object oriented or functional (the push for objects-first has mostly died off, but I still see remnants of it in various curricula).

If it's got a few basics like conditionals, iteration, structured grammar, etc. it will be plenty to give students the flavor of what programming is about.

The better criteria, in my mind, are "does it allow you to make/do something interesting?" and "how easily does it lead into the next level of learning?".

For me the criterion was "is it awesome?"

Growing up, that meant Flash and Java.

Still not sure why we decided to make the internet stop being awesome.

Before scratch was popular I was heavily into Game Maker as a teenager (2006-2009). Didn't pick up actual programming again until I got to university and did some Matlab as a part of a math unit which triggered a major shift into CompSci.

The issue was always the barrier to entry and ability to self-teach for real-world programming seemed so high as a kid, especially when you had nobody around you to even point you in the right direction. It seems so obvious now but I'm certain back then googling things was not as useful as it is now, you couldn't just stumble your way into a programming environment.

Parse the question more closely:

Has [early] Scratch [experience] [led to] [fulfilling] [careers]?

All those modifiers create so much leeway that answering the question can be no more than a parlor game. How early? What kind of experience? By led, do we mean direct causality? What is fulfilling? Is a job a career?

Teaching is lighting tinder in various stages of dryness and hoping that it smolders for long enough that you can add fuel to the fire and get something going. In the right environment, it doesn't matter how you light it. Scratch, card games, helping grandma with recipes, does it really matter?

Too soon to tell if it'll lead to "fulfilling careers" but both my kids learnt Scratch very early on, in the 2nd grade or so, and found they had a knack for programming. Based on that I prodded them to dabble in Python. Now in high school, at least the older one is already planning a career in software engineering.

(He also teaches elementary schoolers Scratch at a Coder School location, and they seem to like it.)

The visual game-building aspect is an immediate draw, of course, but I also think the block-based approach is a great analogue to building things with Lego. It just clicks for some kids. It is also fairly representative of most coding, in the sense you assemble "blocks" comprising commands / statements / function calls in a particular order based on the shapes of their inputs and ouputs to build a larger structure.

One thing my kids struggled a bit with was going from the event-based nature of Scratch to the more linear nature of Python, along with the concept of scopes. It led to some form of "magical" thinking where they assumed e.g. a function / variable would be reachable based just on its signature / type. But other than that most concepts transferred over easily enough to conventional languages.

"Too soon to tell if it'll lead to "fulfilling careers" but both my kids learnt Scratch very early on…"

And indeed, who cares if Scratch leads to a fulfilling career? "Computer literacy" is even more important these days—understanding what goes on behind the curtain. Scratch (and a whole lot of other things) show children that it's not magic—it's just a machine following instructions.

(Never mind whether software engineering can be described as fulfilling.

"The paramedic thinks I'm clever because I play guitar,

I think she's clever because she stops people dying."

Courtney Barnett— )

I don't think there's always obvious linearity with learning, especially not these days where you have more options vs. elders copying programs from magazines line by line or however the legend goes.

How responsible was fiddling with vbulletin/phpbb forum plugins in my eventual career, one of the first things I remember doing and for quite a long time?

I have no idea, and it was just one of the various things I did as a noob, none of them with an impact particularly memorable. There were a bunch of nodes in a daisy chain of things I tried out, and over time I could take on bigger and bigger projects with fewer and fewer rails.

I had never heard of scratch before but I find this line of thought generally backwards. Maybe that's what carmack is getting at but it seems to me that early "exposure" doesn't really matter as much as people want it to.

There is so much software all around us these days, any curious kid who's interest is piqued by it will find a way in to the hobby and maybe to a career.

There was a period where having a computer in a classroom was a big deal because it might be a kids only exposure to one but that's not the case today (not everywhere, I know). Kids pursue their interests if they can and software is very easily pursuable these days.

I wish someone showed me something like Scratch when I was younger.

I didn't even get a computer I could mess with until I was like 15. We had a family pc for maybe 6 months in the 90s and I played like, magic school bus, lol.

I really started programming in HS when someone showed me what a function was, that was an epiphany moment. Before that I just liked to build computers and servers; I was hosting HTML sites from our house in 7th grade I think? But still not programming.

I also wish I listed to some rando telling me the money was in C++. I did PHP for too long.

I programmed in Basic some as a kid but it was programming a MUSH (Amber-MUSH) in grad school that got me hooked and changed career course to programming. Made some great friends too.

I dunno about fulfilling career, but I have to admit that I often use BlockSCAD:

https://www.blockscad3d.com/editor/

to rough out designs as well as simple algorithms for OpenSCAD and ultimately, PythonSCAD for my current project:

https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview

I’d be interested in a different question. Do those who think Scratch is a bad starting language for kids have kids?

The benefit of kids learning coding isn’t the language or system. It’s about them learning abstract thought and problem solving. It also introduces them to the concepts of variables, loops, etc. If you can do that in an engaging and enjoyable way you’ve won half the battle already.

I loved scratch in seventh grade and now I’m a principal software engineer a few years out of college, but I think correlating the two would be problematic

My niece made what was (I thought) a pretty impressive scratch game when she was 12 or 13. But now several years later she doesn't seem to have much interest in programming. She is thinking of going into nursing or some related healthcare area in college. I haven't encouraged her with programming, because I think its a dead career - I myself have a CS degree and can no longer earn income from it.

Learning to code isn’t really the point of Scratch. But it does have lasting effects on those who immerse themselves in it, and especially when they immerse themselves in the community. Hear from some of them on the podcast out of the group that created Scratch: https://youtu.be/5h709icMHt4

When I was at school I never really saw the tools intended to get kids interested in CS work out. In fact, many of my classmates began to hate programming because of the Python coursework we had to do. (terrible language choice for classes by the way, because beginners don’t understand how to indent their code and Python is unforgiving in this regard.)

What would you choose instead?

I am trying to get my son to learn Python using Carol Vorderman's book.

Probably JavaScript. Especially easy to get started with, you don't really even need to install or set up anything.

My kid is 13 now and has been creating Scratch games since the pandemic, he's set to be a game designer/developer as a career: https://gamejolt.com/@S10_Studio

I'm legit baffled by his creativity and clever visual jokes.

Who knows about a career, but my kid was super into scratch and has now moved on to godot. I think the learning curve was excellent and helped by a few things: the built in community, the see inside button and the ability to work on projects on a locked down browser/computer at school.

A bit off-point?

> people who started with computers by typing "in basic from magazines."

I recall "typing in" Palo Alto Tiny Basic from Dr. Dobbs,in 8080 assembly code.

Unless I wrote or typed in code to read a paper tape of said code that I got from who knows where, but not from a dumpster.

Or both.

My kids grew up on Scratch and still occasionally play games there. It was a nice way to casually introduce them to programming concepts. My oldest is now 16 and an active member of Hack Club, so I'd say Scratch is one of the activities that may have given him the itch.

I used scratch in cs50 to make a music platformer. I would say it led me down a career in computing

What's a music platformer?

I don't know about the parent's project, but bit.trip runner immediately comes to mind for me!

Most students (90%+) in the CS program I teach at have used scratch as their first language and went on to have a good career. Whenever I ask they have great things to say about Scratch and how it fueled their love for programming.

I used the lego mindstorms environment (scratch-based) way back.

It was quite excellent, along with stuff like Clik n' Play. Basically "event driven" + "blocks so you can't have syntax errors and other silliness" was very good for me.

I personally find that Scratch has very limited utility because kids can start to code in a "real" programming language pretty early on, by like 11 or 12. Would it make a difference in outcome had they started even earlier? I doubt it.

Is there any language designed to be robust in the face of typos? That seems like it would be a pretty big pain point for young coders. I suppose Basic is pretty good in that regard.

Introduced my son to Scratch yonks ago. He found the graphics editor and dove in - he never developed any interest in programming, and now he’s third year in law school.

So maybe his Scratch experience will result in a fulfilling career far from high tech :)

My similar correlation question is with Minecraft. I know multiple people, myself included, who credit Minecraft with starting their career in computing. Would be interesting to hear how many people would credit Minecraft as their start.

I do however know a lot of successful engineers crediting programming on TI-8* graphing calculators to getting them into programming...

I wonder what the best modern equivalent would be? Perhaps web/JS is easy enough to get into these days?

There is so much exposure to programming now that it would be difficult to attribute any outcome to scratch or anything else

n=1, I started programming with Scratch and it led to my software-adjacent career today.

not scratch, but GameMaker visual programming was the first exposure to programming I could understand.

My son (13) does some pretty advanced stuff with Scratch which often leaves me speechless:

https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/1374719935

He started using it when he was 9 and hasn't complained about it being too limited yet.

On the contrary: Whenever I show him environments like Godot or GameMaker he's instantly repelled by how complex everything is. I guess there's nothing quite like Scratch because it's easy yet powerful enough and everything is built-in (code editor, graphics editor, audio editor).

Too bad this is on Nazi Twitter so I’ll never get to read it.

https://archive.ph/XKLGF

Yes John I got my first job because a recruiter noticed I had Scratch and Magna-tiles on my resume.

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