by KIM BELLARD

Someday I’ll probably write about Neuralink, but these days I don’t feel like giving Elon Musk any extra publicity. I also had the notion to take OpenAI’s newly announced ChatGPT down a rabbit hole about U.S. healthcare, just to see where it would go, but Mr. Musk has his fingerprints on that organization too.  Then I saw something worth celebrating: Scratch has hit 100 million users worldwide. 

What’s that? You’re not familiar with Scratch? Well, me neither, until last week. Now that I know a little about it, I kind of feel how I felt when I first discovered TikTok, found out about Roblox, or learned about Raspberry Pi. In all cases, there were big ecosystems aimed at young people, getting them to view tech-related things (e.g., gaming, coding, even building computers) as something natural, something fun, something easy to do, and those ecosystems were largely invisible to most adults.

I’m still waiting for the ecosystem that makes health like that for young people.   

Scratch modestly describes itself as a “coding platform for children.”