From Scratch to Startups: Making an Impact with Sarah Simionescu
Before Sarah Simionescu created and sold her first startup out of McMaster University, she spent time remixing, learning, and sharing in Scratch. Sarah’s coding journey began in grade 5, when her mom showed her a video from Hour of Code. She saw tech leaders and engineers connecting and collaborating over ping-pong tables and video games, and she had one thought: “Sign me up!”
Sarah in Grade 5
Scratch’s low floors and infinite creative possibilities made it an easy choice for beginner Sarah. She grew her skills making games starring a bunny character named Bobby that her classmates loved. And as she gained more coding knowledge, she realized that her talents could make an even bigger impact.
Not Just Any Video Game
Sarah grew up in rural Canada, where there weren’t many likeminded friends for her to connect and code with.
“I remember feeling super lonely … I was in a small town, and there were just not a lot of kids interested in STEM. Specifically, not a lot of girls,” she says. “In elementary school, they closed down the robotics team because they didn't have enough funding.”
In middle school, Sarah participated in a science fair connecting kids across regions in her area. She knew she didn’t want to make “just any video game”: she was ready to make a difference.
“My next-door neighbor was blind,” she says. “So I thought of her, and I was like, ‘Yeah, I'm going to make a video game for her.’”
Sarah interviewed her neighbor about her design requirements and created her first of several audio-based Scratch games: The Hero in the Maze. Audio cues guide players through a maze with a series of challenges and obstacles, like locked doors and hidden objects. The judges loved her focus on accessibility and creative approach to game-making, and she had the chance to share her game with an entire class of students at a local school for the blind.
When she saw the room full of kids enjoying her game, everything clicked into place.
“I was like, ‘Oh my God, I can just code this thing in my room and suddenly 30 people are using it.’ That made me realize the impact you can have, or the scalability of code in general. You make it once, and you can literally distribute it infinitely,” she says. “I just wanted to keep doing it. And I wanted whatever I made to reach more and more people. … That was the biggest lesson: how powerful this stuff is and what impact you can make, good or bad.”
Open Doors & Open Source
When learning to code in Scratch, Sarah’s favorite feature was remixing: the ability to build off of someone else’s code to find out how it works and make something entirely new.
“As someone who was learning, I got to see how very [skilled] programmers approached making games, and that helped me learn,” she says. “I think, when you're young and you're making these projects…you should take it as a compliment if someone remixes your project. That is the highest compliment—that someone thought your work was so cool that they wanted to build on top of it.”
Sarah went on to attend McMaster University, sharpen her computer science skills, and find a community of likeminded collaborators. While there, she developed and sold her first startup platform, a coaching tool for sales teams. She’s currently working at the AI startup Composio, and she’s thrilled that her work is reaching more people than ever. Sarah embraced her remixing roots through college and beyond, and she’s still proud to contribute to and learn from open-source projects – a “give and take” that she believes is foundational to the world of software development.
Sarah pictured with her startup’s founding team
Her advice to Scratchers who are just setting out on their creative journey? “Take advantage of the fact that other people are open-sourcing their projects to learn. And just be open to this as part of the software engineering community, because it only gets more and more important later in your career.”
She’d also like to encourage young coders to put themselves out there and find their community, just like she did. Researching local creative spaces like science fairs or summer camps and sharing in safe online communities like Scratch can provide young people with invaluable feedback opportunities and chances to collaborate with new friends.
“Go share your work with your friends,” Sarah says. “Make games for your friends. Make a club at your school … And to all the people out there who are hopefully going to fall in love with programming the way that I did—go for it!”