Samantha John

Samantha John
Resident

Samantha John is the founder of Hopscotch, a programming platform for kids to make real software. Hopscotch was the first programming language designed for a touch screen device. It has received over 24 million downloads. Nearly half the users are girls.

Business Insider has 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.” Glamour magazine named John in their list of “35 Women Under 35 Who are Changing the Tech Industry”  and the BBC included her in the  “BBC’s 100 Women.” 

John created Hopscotch with fellow Columbia alumnae Jocelyn Leavitt in response to the lack of women and people of color in engineering. Her hope was to create a programming language that was simple enough for children to use, while still allowing children to learn and be creative. As such, the app involves a visual programming language, rather than employing lines of code. Aimed at children ages eight to 12, Hopscotch was downloaded 20,000 times in its first week. To date, kids have created over 35 million games.