Comment by anon291

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.