Margaret Honey 75S Oversees Organization Teaching Children STEM Skills Through Playful Computer Coding

“I’m thrilled to join an organization that values creative and imaginative learning opportunities for young people and is at the forefront of making education exciting,” Dr. Honey says in the Scratch Foundation’s press release on her appointment. “The Scratch Foundation is uniquely positioned to continue empowering generations of creative thinkers.”
 
Scratch is an interactive community in which users of the website, primarily aged eight to sixteen, can employ a coding language with a simple visual interface to create digital stories, games, and animations. Through sharing their creations with one another, Scratch members are part of a kid-friendly, STEM-centered social media platform full of diverse and innovative programs.
 
The website has more than 100 million registered users across 196 countries in more than 70 languages. The program — free to all — seeks “to spread creative, caring, collaborative, equitable approaches to coding and learning around the world” by “providing young people with digital tools and opportunities to imagine, create, share, and learn.” The Scratch Foundation was established as a nonprofit organization in 2013 to keep up with the coding community’s rapid expansion as it transitioned from a desktop application to a website.
 
Honey joins the Scratch Foundation as its new president and CEO at a time when the site’s user base is growing 25 percent annually. Says one of Scratch’s cofounders, Professor Mitchel Resnick of the MIT Media Lab, “Margaret’s deep expertise and experience with innovative approaches to education and technology make her the perfect leader for the Scratch Foundation. Her proven leadership and her dedication to fostering creative learning experiences align seamlessly with the mission and spirit of Scratch.”
 
Margaret Honey found her way to Hampshire College in the ’70s after reading Summerhill, a 1960 book similar to Hampshire’s The Making of a College, which details educational experimentation. She went on to earn a Ph.D. in environmental psychology from Columbia and got a job creating Sesame Street–inspired computer games: “I was passionate about the nexus of media, learning, and technology,” she told her high school’s alumni magazine. From there, she went on to work on the educational TV show The Voyage of the Mimi, creating computer games based on the series to use in classrooms.
 
For the 15 years leading up to her appointment at Scratch, Honey was the president and CEO of the New York Hall of Science, overseeing interactive, STEM-centered educational initiatives for children, including the launch of a pre-K center on the museum’s campus, the first of its kind in New York City. Before that, she served as vice president of the Educational Development Center, a global nonprofit organization to improve education, promote health, and expand economic opportunity across the United States and in more than 80 other countries.