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Has early Scratch experience led to fulfilling careers?

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Re: Has early Scratch experience led to fulfilling careers?

#31

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

enobrev wrote: post #10
kylecazar wrote: post #2

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...

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…

This really made me think about what got me interested in programming and I have no idea. In HS, I had a Physics teacher who had a TRS-80 (Model 3, I think) and he would let us use it during Lunch for whatever. But I was already interested at that point. We had a "programming" class where we programmed some kind of computer in some unknown language, but again, I was already interested in programming before then: that was just the outlet.

Really have me wondering now.

Re: Has early Scratch experience led to fulfilling careers?

#32

Post by jkahrs595 »

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.

Re: Has early Scratch experience led to fulfilling careers?

#33

Post by burnto »

bigyikes wrote: post #25
burnto wrote: post #23

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?

The snarky analogy doesn’t really really work because plenty of people actually do credit video games for their successful career, myself included. Thanks, Roblox.

And plenty of great authors start with fanfic. Like actually. But apologies the snark landed that way. I was not intending to diminish people learning via game modding at all.

What I found irritating in the post is the premise that what we put in front of kids should be judged by counts of attributions to career success.

Re: Has early Scratch experience led to fulfilling careers?

#34

Post by trashface »

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.

Re: Has early Scratch experience led to fulfilling careers?

#35

Post by ghostly_s »

paxys wrote: post #30

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.

Is there any language designed to be robust in the face of typos? That seems like it would be a pretty big pain point for young coders. I suppose Basic is pretty good in that regard.

Re: Has early Scratch experience led to fulfilling careers?

#36

Post by bgoated01 »

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.

Re: Has early Scratch experience led to fulfilling careers?

#37

Post by zephen »

jkahrs595 wrote: post #32

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.

More like asking if anyone in the Tour de France has credited a win to early use ofone of those little Fred Flinstone-style kiddie cars where they use their feet on the ground for locomotion.

Re: Has early Scratch experience led to fulfilling careers?

#38

Post by raimondious »

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

Re: Has early Scratch experience led to fulfilling careers?

#39

Post by JLO64 »

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.

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