Scratch Alumni Series: Sam Cheng, Lifelong Tinkerer and Builder
By Melodie D
High school sophomore Sam Cheng, samalander on Scratch, has always loved to tinker. From California’s Silicon Valley, he and a friend are currently building a 12-foot boat to sail in the San Francisco Bay and have been spending time researching and exploring different flotation devices and sails. Boats are just one kind of thing Sam has built, from websites, to social media apps, to 12-foot wooden boats, he enthusiastically shared, “I just love to make things.”
Establishing skyscraper-sized foundations
Sam discovered Scratch around second grade when a teacher introduced it during school. It was his first introduction to coding and “it really opened my eyes to what coding could let me do and the different types of super cool things I could make with coding.” Scratch was “a place where I could release my creativity. It was a great thing for me to build stuff and for me to create things; and I could do it and learn while doing it. It was so great to be able to create stuff and share it and people would see it.” Moreover,
“it really felt liberating to be able to make all this super unique, cool, innovative stuff. As a kid, I wasn’t really able to make things and it was really hard to be able to express my creativity in a unique way. And Scratch let me do that.”
Scratch was a place where Sam could establish foundational knowledge about coding. Using Scratch reminded Sam of building with LEGOs, “I had to reinforce [my creations] in specific ways and learn about the framework for how they worked.” Similarly, the foundational knowledge and frameworks in problem solving and basic coding he learned in Scratch was valuable in learning text-based coding languages like Python, Lua, and JavaScript.
Sam recognizes that coding is complicated, and compared the importance of learning the fundamentals of coding to build amazing projects as analogous to laying a strong foundation — whether with LEGOs or concrete — to build sky-high buildings. He shared, “a lot of people like to dive straight into coding. They want to build a skyscraper but they don’t lay the foundation first, so people are building this foundation the size of a house and then they end up trying to put a skyscraper on top of that and are not really able to do that.”
When he had the opportunity to help others learn the text-based coding language JavaScript, he observed, “it was really hard for them to grasp the understanding of what stuff was doing. So they ended up seeing a fragment of code and would know that it does something, but didn’t know why it does it.” When making a button, for example, although they knew that a certain sequence of code would trigger an action when the button was clicked, they did not understand why the code triggered that specific action. Thus, when they wanted to create a different kind of button, it was difficult because they did not understand foundational logic behind the original coding sequence.
When he codes in text-based languages, Sam shared that it’s because of Scratch that, “I know what to do and I know the steps I have to take. It provides a really good framework for what you need to learn and the essential concepts you need to learn so that you can make really cool things.”
Scratch was also a space where he could experiment through trial and error. Similar to his current passion — web development — Sam described Scratch as, “one of those things where it’s really good for rapid prototyping and you can see results really quickly.” Having built a foundation in problem-solving and “rapid prototyping” through tinkering in Scratch, Sam is also able to apply the same puzzle-solving skills to building and troubleshooting new projects now.
Building and reinvesting in community
Builders do not create in isolation. Sam’s coding journey in Scratch was supported and encouraged by other Scratchers on and off the site. He recalls,
“what really stood out to me [about the Scratch community] is just how friendly and kind and encouraging it was. I remember sharing projects online in the Scratch community and getting amazing feedback. Everyone was so positive and it was a great space to be in. Scratch is just that friendly place where everyone can be included and everyone can be acknowledged and learn and share.”
His passion for Scratch incentivized him and friends with a similar passion to create a coding club in fifth grade where they explored Scratch and other coding languages. He recalls that the club was “a place where I could be creative and a place where I could share my projects. I really just wanted to amplify that and create a little community inside of our school.
“Although it was pretty small, I wanted to find more people like me and create bigger and better things, learn from each other, teach other people, expand my knowledge, and have fun.”
Now, Sam uses his talent in coding to solve real-world problems he has personally encountered as well as to help others and reinvest in his community. His entry for Code By Kids’ Ctrl+Shift competition was a result, he shares, of “getting tired of trying to find answers and learning online and everything was full of ads.” His solution was Beedol: “a place where students or teachers could explain concepts to other students — it’s being taught by someone who just learned it, and they know the best ways that they learned the thing.”
At school, he has helped develop an “Instagram-like” social media application for his art teacher where the teacher and students in his art class can all share their artwork, and similar to Instagram, follow one another and like each other’s creations. Through his work in web development, he’s also had the opportunity to help others create, innovate, and spread their ideas.
Looking forward
Sam’s recommendation for those wanting to learn how to code echoes his own “tinkering” mindset. Although taking classes and watching tutorials can be helpful, he encourages people who want to learn how to code to ultimately,
“get in there and start making stuff.”
Although his many interests and personal passion projects do not follow a set course, he shared that there is always, “a lot of stuff that comes up or that I realize is a problem that I want to solve, like make a company, or an app or something like that.” Whether it be designing websites, digital applications, or building and launching a 12-foot boat in the San Francisco Bay, Sam’s love for puzzle-solving will continue to guide him forward to discover new projects and interests, as well as new ways to solve problems.
If you’d like to connect with Sam Cheng and learn more about his work, you can connect with him at: https://www.samalander.dev/
If you or someone you know is interested in participating in this Scratch Alumni series, please complete this form: https://forms.gle/9W74ihAepqNSt7636
