Carmack: Has early Scratch experience led to fulfilling careers?

kylecazar

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...

outlore

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

threatofrain

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.

zulux

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.

_caw

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.

scarecrw

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?".

makeramen

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?

jim-works

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.

WillAdams

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

ezfe

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

jjmarr

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

rtpg

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.

jasongi

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.

eikenberry

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.

burnto

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?

jawns

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.

shwaj

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.

Aquitard

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

bix6

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

paxys

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.