It might still be a bit too early to tell I would have thought - Scratch 2.0 was released in 2013 so a child who was 7 when that was released would only be 20 now. It might also be hard to disentangle from the effect of AI on early careers in programming these days.
I have mixed feelings about Scratch but it does engage children more than most other tools out there and I suspect its value isn't so much for the children who would have become programmers come what may, but in terms of increasing a baseline understanding of some programming concepts in the more general population and helping some children discover they enjoy programming who never would have done otherwise.
It's very hard to not give them internet access at all though even if you don't give them a phone, because they need it for homework and you can't and don't want to supervise them every moment they are doing homework.
A lot of parental control systems stop working when they turn 13 so you have a system that works fine and then suddenly it stops working. I know a lot of parents who have complained about this.
Likewise at Oxford - only the final exams counted (though you had to pass first year exams to continue to the second year).
But you had tutorials each week, and if your tutors thought you weren't doing enough work they could set you exams mid-course called 'penal collections' and if you failed them you could be thrown out. They were rare but definitely not unknown.
I do feel that if there were actually decent parental controls on the most used systems out there then we might not have got to this point in the first place! It is either a nightmare or impossible to set any sort of sensible controls on internet and social media access for children and teenagers.
In maths, if you do well enough in the exam, you have to really mess up the interview to not get in though I would say. If you're borderline, the interview is important though - the interviews will usually be 95% maths questions so it's more like doing an oral exam where you have to explain your thinking process and answers.
I'm sure it probably depends on the discipline (and indeed the college, since some are harder to get into than others). I can see how this would be important in mathematics where it is hard to avoid rules and structure. In other areas, the decisions will be much more subjective.
Having interviewed maths applicants for Oxford, I don't think it's just corruption or biases - there are just more really bright students that you have places for and have to reject some people! We all tried really hard not be biased but I don't think there is any way to guarantee that you aren't somehow, however hard you try.
It's very hard to predict from a half hour interview precisely who will do well in future, and in fact some people might do better having gone to other universities. Oxford and Cambridge aren't the best choice for everybody - I'm sure being a bigger fish in a smaller pond suits some people better.
No judgement here. And you are right btw; we are biased constantly in everything we do, and it's a better person than you our me that can truly dodge it!
I read a study a while ago (sorry Google didn't find it again) that said a lot of exceptionally gifted people just don't apply to elite universities. Instead, the main characteristic of applicants tends to be that they are extremely driven.
Drive tends to not correlate well to long term success without talent as a companion. Therefore a lot of people at Cambridge (which I think was the example) tend to do no better than the average in later life (notably wasn't true for PPE grads obviously)
When I was an infant I'd waddle through my mothers garden to my favourite fruit tree... a chilly bush. I'd pick the red chillies and eat them with gusto. My mouth would turn red but that didn't bother me. These were very hot chillies that my parents couldn't eat even when they were green.
Sadly, I lost that super power at some point. I love a spicy curry, but I don't think I'd make it through a Hot Ones episode as a guest.
I am a fan of Anki for lots of things but it always puzzled me people trying to learn analysis and group theory by memorising lots and lots of parts of their lecture notes.
I would test myself on the main steps of some of the proofs before exams but that was the nearest I got to memorisation. It felt like if you needed to memorise definitions then you hadn't used them enough. Even 30 years later, not having done maths for most of that time, I could still tell you the most of the definitions and could still do an epsilon-delta proof - they feel like conceptual things rather than memory things.
Perhaps I was in a way doing spaced repetition just by trying to solve lots of problems and looking things up if I didn't know them but it didn't feel like a memorisation process, more a process of trying to really really understand the mathematics.
I don't agree with age verification, but there isn't anywhere 'set your children's ages in their device accounts' that limits their access to inappropriate content and social media.
You can set age in Google Accounts, but they can access pretty much anything when they reach age 13 (which is about the age a lot of these things start to become a real problem) and as a parent you don't have any way to limit that. They don't even need to ask to install new phone apps.
Children also use computers as well as phones and you don't want to stop them using a web browser! You also obviously can't supervise them every moment they are online even if you wanted to.
I have a hard time calling it a technological advancement, that's what it was when we had bloggers and forums some 20 years ago. Until we all collectively agree that kids should not have smartphones and iPads until they're maybe 17, or come up with a solution where they do have them but will only be able to use them for Maps, Books, Word/Excel, the Chrome Dino game, Tetris, and obviously messaging/calling with parents - without being the weird ones in the classroom. Until then, it's one ugly experiment which got completely out of hands.
Agreed. Many parents I've spoken to want operating systems to provide a standard set of age and/or content flags that app stores and websites are required to respect.
But various groups are deliberately conflating that desire for self-attested flags with verification: Politicians who want to police speech, companies who want to advertise to verified humans, and privacy advocates who want an easier strawman to attack.
I have mixed feelings about Scratch but it does engage children more than most other tools out there and I suspect its value isn't so much for the children who would have become programmers come what may, but in terms of increasing a baseline understanding of some programming concepts in the more general population and helping some children discover they enjoy programming who never would have done otherwise.
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