Too bad this is on Nazi Twitter so I’ll never get to read it.
Has early Scratch experience led to fulfilling careers?
51–60 of 102 posts
Re: Has early Scratch experience led to fulfilling careers?
#52Parse 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?
Re: Has early Scratch experience led to fulfilling careers?
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
Re: Has early Scratch experience led to fulfilling careers?
#54Too 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.
Re: Has early Scratch experience led to fulfilling careers?
#55It'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 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)
Re: Has early Scratch experience led to fulfilling careers?
#56It'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...
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 - litera…
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.
Re: Has early Scratch experience led to fulfilling careers?
#57Too 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.) Th…
"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— )
Re: Has early Scratch experience led to fulfilling careers?
#58I 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...
Re: Has early Scratch experience led to fulfilling careers?
#59My 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).
Re: Has early Scratch experience led to fulfilling careers?
#60Where 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'"