By Holy Baxter 

Once upon a time, “learn to code” was the answer to every dying industry. It was the mantra of bootcamps, the moral of every op-ed about automation, the smug refrain lobbed at laid-off journalists and humanities majors alike. Coding was supposed to be the last safe job in a world eaten by software.

Mitch Resnick has spent most of his career trying to make technology feel more like play. At the MIT Media Lab, where he leads the Lifelong Kindergarten group, he developed Scratch — the block-based programming platform that turned millions of children into coders without them ever typing a line of syntax. The idea was simple but quietly radical: instead of teaching kids to memorize commands, let them drag and snap colorful logic blocks together, more like Lego than code. In the process, they’d learn the habits of mind behind programming — breaking problems into parts, debugging, iterating — without the intimidation of text-based languages. Scratch was phenomenally successful and is now used worldwide in schools from kindergarten age onwards. But when I ask Resnick whether Scratch successfully prepared kids for a coding-based jobs market, he’s clear: “Preparing young people to get jobs as software developers was never the goal.”

Resnick’s “ultimate goals have never been specifically about coding,” but instead about “helping young people develop as creative, curious, caring and collaborative learners.” That’s an important distinction, because the qualities he names are specifically human qualities that an AI would struggle to emulate.