This I Believe: Technology Facilitates Creativity

This is the essay I wrote for NPR Illinois’s annual This I Believe Illinois program in 2024.

To most people, myself included, technology is often a distraction. But I believe it’s also a facilitator of creativity. When I discovered Scratch in 2015, I didn’t think much of it at first; I just thought it was just another website for people to play games on. Little did I know at the time that Scratch would change my life.

I joined the Scratch in February 2016. At the time, I was a measly home-schooled student, and I felt that I had nothing else to do. But it was at this point that I realized I could write my own programs. It was (and still is) incredibly easy to do; dragging some blocks into the editor was all it took. Before long, I was making more and more complex games.

Every game I made had some sort of inspiration. It also showed what I was (and in some cases still am) interested in at that time. Some of my games were written through my passion and to challenge myself, others were made to tell a story. And I think that video games are the best way to tell a story.

My discovery of Scratch was perhaps the most important part of my life story. It shaped me into the person I am today, and without it, I don’t know what else I would be doing. It’s ultimately what got me interested in how the world around me works. Technology allows people to do virtually anything. And while that includes spending way too much time scrolling through social media, it also includes facilitating creativity. I can write programs that allow me to do things that I otherwise would not be able to do. I can make some of my other hobbies easier to do as well. One of which is keeping tabs on what the clouds are doing all over the world.

While I’ve stopped sharing projects to Scratch, its spirit still lives on within me. Now I’ve gone above and beyond, making some pretty impressive projects. There have been times where I felt that Scratch just wouldn’t cut it, and that motivated me to learn other programming languages, namely Python and Java. I still occasionally write games in Scratch, though, and I hope that those games will inspire other people to be creative.