Scratch Alumni Series: Yuko Nagakura, Building Confidence and Community through Code
By Melodie D
Yuko Nagakura, a recently graduated high school student in Kyoto, Japan, first started her coding journey at age eight on Scratch. She took a course that introduced her to the online coding platform and began exploring more on her own. Yuko’s introduction to coding with Scratch has inspired her to continue a ten year — and counting — journey of exploring with code and sharing with other young people around Asia that they too, can create and collaborate with code.
Learning how to “be creative through code”
For Yuko, Scratch was “easy to understand.” She also remembers that learning to code with Scratch was “quick and fun.” However, she remembers struggling as she began to transition to other coding languages like JavaScript and Python, “I struggled with getting to the stage in coding where it was fun and there were a lot of things involved that kind of took the fun away from [coding] at first. It takes a long time to get to the level of games with designs, characters, and all of those [other] aspects if you were to do it in another language.” Although she says she was able to overcome this initial hurdle because she was older and “had more patience” to learn the syntax of coding languages like JavaScript and Python, she shared that her Scratch coding experience did not have the same initial, high learning curve.
Scratch’s global, online community is another way that young people are inspired, engaged, and supported in their coding journey. Yuko humorously remembers when she first shared a project on Scratch, “I don’t think I really had a grasp on what making something public even really meant.” At the time, she was living in Hawaii, where “it wasn’t as common to find other people who were interested in coding.” However, joining the Scratch community opened her to a whole world of young people who had the same interest in coding as her. She was able to share projects of her own, “find projects from a completely different place,” and connect with young people worldwide around a shared love of creating with code.
Nurturing creativity, tinkering, and experimentation are fundamental to the Scratch coding experience. For Yuko, “one of the best parts” about Scratch was the endless creative possibility:
I would always do projects but I didn’t really have this concrete plan of what I wanted my end product to be. I could just play around with everything there.
Coding in other languages was different — there was often a specific goal or end product in mind, “which I think limited my creativity because I didn’t want to write official code, then delete it, and then all my time goes to waste.” Creating a safe and encouraging environment in the Scratch community to make mistakes and centering the importance of play in the coding experience encourages young people to experiment and create with code without facing the pressure to create a perfect code or project.
Yuko spent her middle school years attending school in the San Francisco Bay area, where she was surrounded and encouraged by a community of like-minded peers who were also exploring and collaborating with code. She remembers being “surrounded by tech” both inside and outside of school. For Yuko, this underscored the importance of community support in her coding journey. Being surrounded by like-minded peers who were also “interested [in coding], even if we weren’t considering a job in the tech industry” was important in normalizing coding as an activity that, even though “it wasn’t like I wanted to take on a career path deep in tech, I was still doing coding and I still enjoyed it. I was still participating in it.”
Creating community with World Coding Club
Moving back to Japan for high school, she noticed that coding wasn’t as normalized at her new school nor her new environment. It was not that “there were opportunities to come across coding, but I chose to turn them down. It was [that] the question of learning to code wasn’t continuously, actively being asked in the same way that I think young students in America are. It was clear to me that opportunities were limited and I wanted to do something about it.”
Wanting to “do something” was the motivation behind World Coding Club,
A student organization dedicated to providing quality, hands-on technology education for children. By introducing more youth to computer science and tech entrepreneurship, we hope to inspire them to pursue a path in technology and explore what it has to offer.
The organization, led by Yuko and two other young people, was an initiative to introduce “hackathons and coding competitions to students in Japan and eventually throughout Asia and around the world.”
Yuko and her fellow co-founders began sharing about the initiative by first reaching out to schools and teachers around Japan. Information about World Coding Club would then filter down to the students through the schools and teachers who responded positively to their outreach. However, Yuko and her other co-founders realized that this method was not accessible.
If we were reaching out actively to schools that already had teachers who were looking for opportunities for their students and were interested in technology and coding, we were reaching out to people who were more likely to have those opportunities.
Then we would never really get registrations from people who weren’t in that environment.
Some of these underrepresented communities included young Japanese women. When Yuko and the two other World Coding Club founders first started sharing news about their organization and inviting registrants, she noticed a significant difference between the number of girls and boys who registered. To address the barriers to access and level the gender gap that became evident in the registration data, they began focusing outreach efforts directly on students, posting on websites targeted towards middle and high school audiences so there was a higher likelihood of reaching out to communities of students who had not previously been actively encouraged to participate in this space.
The decision to use the hackathon model to reach other students was grounded in the idea that play and collaboration in coding is essential. She knows many other young Japanese people who enjoy coding, but “it’s treated as if you’re really interested in a very niche academic subject.” Hackathons are fun, and she thinks “it’s so important to make whatever you’re throwing out to students seem fun.”
Yuko loves seeing how students from around the world collaborate with each other on projects. “They’re meeting each other for the first time and they might be from different places. They’ll be working through time zones and discussing their projects with very different views on it.” She remembers a younger team solving a heat problem by “making cold juices from fruit. [They] were talking about how if people had access to cold drinks they could make easily at home, it could help with a heat problem.” Rather than focusing on coding as a technical skill feeding into a career pipeline in the STEM sectors, Yuko hopes through World Coding Club, that anyone with or without previous coding experience can see coding as something “fun” and “lighthearted” and that coding together can foster collaborative problem solving with peers worldwide.
Looking Forward — What’s next?
Yuko’s decade of coding has opened up some surprising opportunities. “I did not expect it to become a reason why I meet new people and find new communities,” she says. “I’ll meet someone and they’ll be interested in coding and then I’ll have something to talk to them about.”
The values of community, creativity and confidence Yuko has learned through coding have continued to guide her work beyond it. Not only has it fostered new connections, it’s also given her the motivation to share her work and “gain the confidence to pursue other projects.” She has many passions and interests that she is interested in exploring beyond high school, including nonprofit work and social entrepreneurship. However, through it all, she hopes to remain adjacent to code and the communities she has built through and with it.
If you’d like to connect with Yuko and learn more about her work, you can connect with her on LinkedIn at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yukonagakura/
To learn more about World Coding Club, visit their website: https://www.worldcodingclub.org/
If you or someone you know is interested in participating in this Scratch Alumni series, please complete this form: https://forms.gle/9W74ihAepqNSt7636
