In the POP Seat™
In the POP Seat: Margaret Honey on Scratch, Kids’ Agency, and Imagination as “the Currency of the Future”
Margaret Honey knows what motivates kids. A developmental psychologist with a storied career in children’s interactive media, she currently serves as president and CEO of the Scratch Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to “helping kids everywhere create what they imagine.” Scratch is both a coding community that reaches millions of young users around the world and a coding language originally developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab. Scratch is also integrated into BrainPOP Creative Coding, which empowers kids to show what they know across a range of subjects as they build computational thinking and coding skills.
Though Dr. Honey first met Scratch Founder Mitch Resnick during her time in graduate school, her journey came full circle in 2024 when she took the reins of the organization. It was a natural next step, reflecting an enduring commitment to putting kids’ creativity at the center of their learning experience. “There’s no more important way to solidify knowledge and understanding than through that process of representing something,” she reflects, “and that is at the heart of BrainPOP’s work, and it’s at the heart of Scratch’s work as well.”
Name: Margaret Honey
Role & Organization: President and CEO, Scratch Foundation
Margaret, you’ve had a fascinating career. What was your journey to your current role at the helm of the Scratch Foundation?
I was working on my doctorate at Columbia University, and I desperately needed to find a job. I got lucky. I was standing in a registration line, and I struck up a conversation with the woman behind me. It turned out she worked at Sesame Workshop, which at the time was called the Children’s Television Workshop, and she invited me to come talk with them. I did, and I was hired to work in a new division of the company called the Children’s Computer Workshop. This was in 1981, so the whole arena of interactive media was very, very new, and the Workshop was doing such interesting, thoughtful work.
One of my first assignments, which set the stage for everything that followed, was doing pre-production research. I was told to go talk to the people who ran the software store on 73rd and Lexington Avenue because they knew everything that young people were buying. Based on their guidance, we purchased many different kinds of software programs and took them to a computer camp in Eastern Connecticut where we set up game-playing clubs. We were doing what I’ve always loved, which is taking our cues from young people and learning from them about where they locate their enthusiasm, their interests, their passion, their agency.
I went on to work in children’s media, particularly the interactive media field, across many different institutions, including Bank Street College of Education and the Center for Children and Technology, which later became part of the Education Development Center. Eventually, I landed at the New Hall of Science, which might seem like a departure, but it’s not. What NYSCI offered was a platform that is hands-on, creative, kid centered, and interactive. It enabled us to do a lot of innovative work and experimentation on creative STEM learning. We developed an approach to creative learning that we called “Design-Make-Play,” and we built out an R&D division and created exhibits, programs, and products, all of which centered young people’s agency.
Throughout my career, I’ve had a connection to Scratch—even before there was a Scratch! I was in grad school when I first met Mitch Resnick, Scratch’s founder. We became friends and stayed in touch. Later, when I was exploring professional next steps, I talked to Mitch, and he told me all about Scratch. He and his team had been working on it for a while, but it had just launched, and I was deeply impressed by what he had built. Around 2015, Mitch was beginning to think about how he might give Scratch a life beyond his university-based lab by setting up a freestanding 501c3 and continuing to innovate in the creative learning and kids media space. He asked me to get involved as a board member, and I did.
In the beginning of 2024, I joined the Scratch Foundation as its president & CEO. After nearly a year in this role, I think what is really extraordinary about what Mitch and his colleagues at the Lifelong Kindergarten group created with Scratch is that it’s probably one of the most kid-centric platforms out there. Mitch didn’t create Scratch to teach kids about coding. He created an accessible approach to coding so that kids could use code as a way to create and make and express themselves. That’s such an important differentiator because Scratch is not a platform that says, “I want you to learn X.” It is a platform that says, “Here, this is for you, and you can use it to make and create and do things that you’re passionate about, and in the course of doing that, you can learn from young people who are part of the Scratch community around the world. You can do things together.”
I believe that Scratch’s secret sauce is that it centers children’s agency and passion, and that’s what has led to its phenomenal growth. We’re poised to see 22 million new users on the platform in 2024.
What are your current priorities for Scratch?
The Scratch Foundation has three priorities:
- We are focused on sustaining and innovating the platform.
- We are focused on amplifying the impact of Scratch through programmatic and research-based initiatives.
- We are focused on building a sustainable business model for the organization. One of the things that comes with tremendous growth and success is escalating costs, so we are figuring out how to evolve a financial model for the organization that includes a mix of philanthropic and earned revenue.
It really boils down to: “What do you pay attention to in doing all of that work?” At Scratch, we are relentlessly focused on young people. By that I mean, we want their engagement. We want to center their creativity. We want Scratch to be something that has deep, intrinsic value for them.
About 40% of our users encounter Scratch in schools, but well over half of that 40% go on to make their own Scratch accounts at home, which doesn’t happen a lot with educational products. But Scratch is different, and I think it’s different because of our deep, deep commitment to centering kids’ passions. So, how do we do that?
One way is by being in conversation with our users all the time. This year we established a global youth advisory board. Young people between the ages of seven and 17, who come from 38 countries around the world, went through a very rigorous application process. We had nearly 500 applicants. The top 50 applicants were admitted into the inaugural cohort of the advisory board, and they are all amazing. Their knowledge and expertise is stunning. Their desire to contribute and help is so generous and gratifying, and their ideas are rich and powerful. So, they have become a very important voice for us.
We’re also starting to think about creating a roadmap for Scratch 4.0, the next generation of Scratch. Here we are focused on two big areas of exciting work. The first is, how do we center young people’s agency and creative learning in the age of AI? The second is, as our online community has grown, we want to make sure that we can build experiences for deeper, richer collaboration that can be done in safer, just-in-time community structures—or playgrounds—that aren’t open to everyone but are open to your friend group or your class group or your affinity group. We’re trying to figure out what this looks like, and the youth advisory board is going to play a big, important role in helping us shape a lot of that.
How is the platform used in schools versus at home?
Like many things in schools, there are a range of ways Scratch is used: With Hour of Code, kids might learn how to make a project with Scratch. It’s probably used most frequently as a tool that helps kids acquire an understanding of computational thinking and coding.
Scratch is also used in interdisciplinary ways, and this is really where Scratch and BrainPOP intersect: There are teachers that use Scratch as a way for kids to build a project that showcases a concept they have learned.
The other day somebody was telling me about the ways in which Scratch was being integrated into a physics curriculum so that kids could really experiment in a more tangible way with concepts like energy and force and motion. We see examples like this all the time on Scratch.
As you know, Creative Coding in BrainPOP enables teachers to integrate block- and text-based coding across the curriculum. It gives students the opportunity to “show what they know” as they build computational thinking and coding skills. Why is it important for students to learn these skills in context, and how does the Scratch approach to coding help students develop key skills?
I think, fundamentally, what block-based coding does is lower the barrier to entry. It’s visual. It’s more intuitive. You can tinker with it. You can explore. I think that’s really the power of block-based coding. Many of our users like the challenge of learning code through this visual approach that makes room for messing around and for experimentation. Learning through the process of iterating is powerful.
For both BrainPOP and Scratch, this idea of learning to code in context is really powerful—but the emphasis should be put on context more than code. The reason I say that is because the tools that young people are going to work with to build representations of their ideas are going to change. Right now coding is a tool, but as AI comes to the fore, the nature of how you code is going to change dramatically. You’re going to use your thinking, your voice, and your ideas to be in conversation with technology differently.
There’s no more important way to solidify knowledge and understanding than through that process of representing something, and that is at the heart of BrainPOP’s work, and it’s at the heart of Scratch’s work as well. I think that’s why our two founders have such a strong affinity for one another because they deeply understand the power of that kind of learning.
You’ve spoken about Scratch nurturing creative learning and creative thinking. Why is the creative component so important?
Creative learning is a big construct. There is a big difference between what somebody else wants you to learn and what you are motivated to learn. I think one of the challenges that we face broadly in our education system is the challenge of motivation, which is foundational to kids’ creativity. You don’t get one without the other.
If you’re in school, and you’re being asked to fill out worksheets all day long, you don’t have the opportunity to exercise your imagination. Contrast that with an environment that is focused on a topic that kids are interested in: “Let’s investigate the quality of water in our school or the safety of our playground environments.” If you create a context in which young people have the opportunity to think through how to design something, how to make something, how to shape something, you’re changing the motivational dynamics of learning.
Creative learning boils down to giving kids a degree of autonomy and agency to make choices about what problems are important to them and how they are going to solve those problems. I think the greatest mistake that we have made as a nation is to put so much emphasis on a narrow set of tests. We’ve been doing this for a long time, and we’re not seeing significant improvements in kids’ performance. Where kids succeed is in environments where they have the agency to solve problems, not fill out worksheets or spend hours on test prep.
What matters to me, and this is particularly true in the realm of digital media, is what is our foundational pedagogy? If that foundational pedagogy is child centered and problem based, it leads you down a very different path than if it’s mastery based or efficiency based, where learning is delivered incrementally based on artificial indicators rather than kids’ interests and ideas.
To bring this back to Scratch, I feel incredibly privileged to be leading an organization that is making creative work and creative problem solving possible for millions of children around the world.
When it comes to deploying educational technology in the classroom, stakeholder buy-in is imperative. You alluded to the tension between what educators have to get done and allowing kids space to explore and have agency in their learning. When you think about the potential barrier to introducing a new technology, how do you sell the value of incorporating coding into the classroom as beneficial for both teachers and students?
I have been struck over the years by the fact that teachers are always receptive when their kids are highly motivated. So, if you bring a tool or a resource into the classroom, if their kids are interested, if it has a kind of stickiness, then they’ll work to figure out how to adapt it, how to make it work for them.
I think people like us have a responsibility to support educators, and we do that by creating things that are of genuine, intrinsic interest to their students because it creates an opening. It creates a window for more engaged learning.
I bet you see that all the time in the work you do with BrainPOP. I think BrainPOP and Scratch stand in sharp contrast to edtech products that are trying to “dose” kids with the right amount of information at the right time so they will master the right stuff. Just those words, that way of describing a product, strips away all the agency on the part of everyone in the classroom—kids and teachers alike.
I have been struck over the years by the fact that teachers are always receptive when their kids are highly motivated. So, if you bring a tool or a resource into the classroom, if their kids are interested, if it has a kind of stickiness, then they’ll work to figure out how to adapt it, how to make it work for them.
Is there an anecdote you can share about a teacher or parent using Scratch with kids in a way that you would consider a success?
It’s less about “success” being managed by a teacher or a parent and more about how kids use the platform, and there are so many different creative examples. I was in a school in Denmark in October, and kids were figuring out how to drive these little robots around a maze and get them to turn and back up and park. I sat with five or six groups of kids, and they were working independently. They were engaged in figuring out how to tweak and refine the code and in testing and iterating and experimenting.
I think the best learning environments make room for that kind of agency and creativity. It means you have to have such deep confidence in your ability to teach and engage and run a classroom where children are working independently. Designing things that put young people in the driver’s seat can be important to their learning.
We need to grow and evolve and enrich our models of teacher education and teacher learning in support of these ideas, and all the more so now because we are going to see a parade of many different kinds of bots and AI applications enter our lives that answer the questions for us. At Scratch we talk a lot about the idea that imagination is the currency of the future. What is it that we, as humans, need to do in order to keep innovating and evolving, to keep our distinctive contributions to society and to humanity front and center? There’s no doubt about it: AI is extraordinary, and it’s going to become even more extraordinary as a productivity tool. We need to think about the skills and competencies that young people need in order to grow and learn and participate in a world that is going to have computational tools doing a lot of the cognitive work that humans used to do.
Is there a quote you live by?
It’s a Latin quote. It’s a lovely phrase that means, “I shall either find a way or make one,” and I love that because it’s the heart and soul of learning.
Ilana Kurizki is VP, communications and social impact at BrainPOP.
