Comment by codingdave
5 days ago
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 has led to academic improvements across entire school districts"
This sounds amazing! Is there anything more you can share about this? Or any articles/papers about the results or how you supported kids to progress with Scratch?
it's not an irrelevant question if helping kids find fulfilling careers is the goal. what you are saying is that scratch is worthwhile even if that isn't the goal, which i think is awesome in its own right.