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 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...

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.

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

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

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.

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'"

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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?".

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.