Introducing kids to coding at Mozfest
At this year’s Mozfest, we’ll be holding a Mini Game Jam session on Sunday 29th from 11–12 that will introduce kids to HTML, in the context of interactive storytelling and game design. We will also be exhibiting Erase All Kittens on Friday 27th October from 6pm — please come and say hi!
You won’t fail to spot us — we’ll be the ones in white capes with giant ears, and if you’re quick, you might be able to grab some Arca shaped cookies, made by our multi-talented Pixel Wizard, Leonie.
So, how come we’re at Mozfest? Well, a large part of our work over the past two years has involved interviewing hundreds of students, and we’ve come up against the same issue time and again — the huge misconception that coding ‘isn’t creative’. And that means there is still a ‘self-selection’ bias in those who take up coding, and that ‘coincides’ with a gender bias — a significant majority of those who take up coding, inside and outside school, are boys.
We’ve also learnt that the biggest drop-off in interest for students is after the age of 11. So, how do we keep students interested, and engage more of them?
Creating engaging tools and lesson plans which are designed to harness new skills effectively for life after school, would be a great start. One challenge is the fact that most existing coding tools only adhere to the current curriculum. The issues around some curricula move slowly (not much movement on Latin grammar recently, for instance), but in the tech world, things move fast. It’s difficult for lessons to remain obviously relevant. This will greatly affect the extent to which students will be ready for life after school, and may consequently have a big impact on their futures.
For education to be effective in today’s world, schools should be adapting their ways of teaching. For example, Ian Livingstone, founding father of the UK games industry and the driving force behind England’s computing curriculum (and an advisor to E.A.K.), will be opening two free schools in September 2019, with the purpose of ‘embedding digital creativity in future generations of our society’.
These schools will offer an education rooted in science, technology, engineering, arts and maths, and promise the latest in technology and creative thinking to prepare students more effectively for our new digital era. Our objective shouldn’t just be to teach kids how to code — as this on its own isn’t effective — we should be teaching them how to think, collaborate, and become lifelong learners.
The key is to treat coding less like a standalone subject and more like a literacy that spans the entire curriculum — much like reading and writing. Coding is a way of expressing yourself, rather than something to be learned for its own sake.
In trying to come up with our own answer, we devised Erase All Kittens — a web-based platform game that introduces children aged 8+ to professional coding languages whilst helping to build up their creativity and critical thinking skills. In E.A.K. players can edit the source code that governs the game’s environment, enabling them to build and fix real levels as they play, using HTML.
When we beta-tested the game with several Oasis Learning Community schools, we learnt that it encourages students to become researchers, teachers, problem solvers, team builders, writers and designers, as well as coders. We showed that coding is a tool that can inspire and equip students to build their own simple creations on the web, and provides teachers with the opportunity to become the facilitators of independent, autonomous learning.
Computing in schools has enormous potential. It’s an opportunity to provide students with far more of an understanding of the world around them, and give them the confidence to think about changing it from their earliest years. In order to engage young children though, programming needs to be meaningful — not just about learning the concepts and procedural building blocks.
If we want to inspire children to become creators, rather than consumers of technology, it’s essential that we shake up code education and deliver it in a number of different, and more creative, ways.
Come to our Mini Game Jam session at Mozfest and show your kids that learning to code can be fun. We’re hoping that by the end, they will feel inspired to learn more about designing and building for the web.
Dee Saigal is Chief Scribbler at Erase All Kittens
