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

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.

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 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?

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 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.

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.