Culture and benefits at Hopscotch

At Hopscotch, our values influence everything we do. They define how we work together and infuse our actions every day: - Be a force for good in society. - Think about the big picture. - Be resilient-- design the test first and have a plan for failure. - Understand the problem before trying to find a solution. - Poop is ok. The first two values go together. To be a force for good, you need to understand the big picture. You also need to be clear on what "good" means. When you teach kids new concepts, you are influencing the thinking of the next generation, so you had better show them the right ones. What this means in practice is that we will take the time to talk through the deeper issues behind what we do. It's normal to have an hour-long conversation about the best metaphor for coding to use in a tutorial video. The next value, " design the test first", is about rigor. Before we start coding, we form a hypothesis and define the metrics for success. We always have a plan for failure so we can approach a release as an experiment and interpret the results with neutrality. The fourth value, understand the problem before trying to find a solution, defines our approach to communication. You see this value when there's a disagreement on the team. Step one is to bring the argument back to the problem. This technique works for everything from pull-request reviews to messages with kids on our forum. Finally, poop is ok. Kids think poop emojis are funny, and so do we. Our customers are children, so a silly sense of humor is apt. You can see this day-to-day in our company Slack. Everyone's avatar is a photo of them as a child. These remind us that we're all still children at heart. We live these values every day. When we come together for a team meeting and play games on Hopscotch, we see how our culture matters. It's reflected in the projects made by kids programming in Hopscotch every day.