Carmack: Has early Scratch experience led to fulfilling careers?

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

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.

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?

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.

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...

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.

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.)

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?".

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 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 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 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?

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

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

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

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