Samantha John (born ) is an American entrepreneur, known for being the co-founder of

Hopscotch Hopscotch is a playground game in which players toss a small object, called a lagger, into numbered triangles or a pattern of rectangles outlined on the ground and then hop or jump through the spaces and retrieve the object. It is a children's ...

, a learn-to-code

application Application may refer to: Mathematics and computing * Application software, computer software designed to help the user to perform specific tasks ** Application layer, an abstraction layer that specifies protocols and interface methods used in a ...

Education and career

John studied

applied mathematics Applied mathematics is the application of mathematics, mathematical methods by different fields such as physics, engineering, medicine, biology, finance, business, computer science, and Industrial sector, industry. Thus, applied mathematics is a ...

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Culture, language and peoples * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England * ''English'', an Amish ter ...

, and

comparative literature Comparative literature studies is an academic field dealing with the study of literature and cultural expression across language, linguistic, national, geographic, and discipline, disciplinary boundaries. Comparative literature "performs a role ...

Columbia University Columbia University in the City of New York, commonly referred to as Columbia University, is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Churc ...

. John became interested in computers and programming in her senior year of college when she began working on a website for a student club. Before developing Hopscotch, she had worked as an engineer and a developer at

Pivotal Labs Pivotal Labs (later VMware Tanzu Labs) was an agile software development consulting firm headquartered in San Francisco, California. The company developed Pivotal Tracker workflow software. It was a division of Pivotal Software. History The c ...

. She had been one of the only women developers at the company. After partnering with Hopscotch co-founder and fellow Columbia alumna Jocelyn Leavitt, John created her first app named "Daisy the Dinosaur" in 2012. John eventually left her consultancy job to pursue the development of Hopscotch full-time. In 2013,

Business Insider ''Business Insider'' (stylized in all caps: BUSINESS INSIDER; known from 2021 to 2023 as INSIDER) is a New York City–based multinational financial and business news website founded in 2007. Since 2015, a majority stake in ''Business Inside ...

listed John as one of the "30 Most Important Women Under 30 in Tech", "Silicon Alley 100", and "28 Extraordinary Women in New York Tech" for cofounding Hopscotch Technologies.

Glamour magazine ''Glamour'' is a multinational online women's magazine published by Condé Nast Publications and based in New York City. It was originally called ''Glamour of Hollywood''. From 1939 to 2019, Glamour was a print magazine. Due to decreasing numb ...

named John and co-founder Leavitt in their list of "35 Women Under 35 Who are Changing the Tech Industry" in 2014. In 2015, she was listed as one of

BBC's 100 Women ''100 Women'' is a BBC multi-format series established in 2013. The annual series examines the role of women in the 21st century and has included events in London and Mexico. Announcement of the list is the start of an international "BBC's wome ...

Hopscotch

John created Hopscotch at the age of 26 with educator Jocelyn Leavitt, who noticed a lack of women and people of color in engineering. Hopscotch is the first programming language designed for a touch screen device. John and Leavitt aimed to create a programming language that was simple enough for children to use, while still allowing children to learn and be creative. The app involves a visual programming language, rather than employing lines of code. Hopscotch, which is aimed at children ages eight to 12, was downloaded 20,000 times in its first week. John and Leavitt first launched the app for

iPad The iPad is a brand of tablet computers developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple that run the company's mobile operating systems iOS and later iPadOS. The IPad (1st generation), first-generation iPad was introduced on January 27, 2010. ...

in 2013, and have since developed the app for

iPhone The iPhone is a line of smartphones developed and marketed by Apple that run iOS, the company's own mobile operating system. The first-generation iPhone was announced by then–Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs on January 9, 2007, at ...

. Within one year, users created over 2.5 million projects. Most children use the app to build games and create animated artwork while learning programming basics. According to the founders, nearly half of Hopscotch's users are girls. Hopscotch was partially inspired by

HyperCard HyperCard is a application software, software application and software development kit, development kit for Apple Macintosh and Apple IIGS computers. It is among the first successful hypermedia systems predating the World Wide Web. HyperCard com ...

, an early software application and development kit which also inspired the creator of "wiki" software, as well as

Scratch Scratch or scratching may refer to: Science and technology * Scratch (programming language), an educational programming language developed by the MIT Media Lab * Scratch space, space on the hard disk drive that is dedicated for only temporary ...

, an early visual programming environment. In addition, John notes inspiration from her mentor,

Alan Kay Alan Curtis Kay (born May 17, 1940) published by the Association for Computing Machinery 2012 is an American computer scientist who pioneered work on object-oriented programming and windowing graphical user interface (GUI) design. At Xerox ...

. John revealed in Shark Tank, that Hopscotch had 200k active users every month for the first time in 2020. Hopscotch has received the Best Education Tech App Awards by Parent Magazine.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:John, Samantha Living people 1980s births American computer programmers American women in business Columbia School of Engineering and Applied Science alumni American women computer scientists American computer scientists American women engineers 21st-century American women scientists Year of birth missing (living people)