We’re Kickstarting to teach girls coding

This is all very exciting.

We’ve just launched a crowdfunding project on Kickstarter to raise funds to create the first adventure game that inspires girls to code and teaches kids professional coding languages. We carried out eighteen months of research interviewing hundreds of students aged 8–13 and working with them, to discover the best ways to teach young children — especially girls — digital skills. As a result, we have made Erase All Kittens, a tool which is first and foremost a game — where the educational elements are woven into the core fabric of high quality gameplay, rather than a few gaming features or characters being bolted on at the end.

Our aim is to expand the game to transform the perception that girls have of computer science, and make code education meaningful — by allowing them to apply practical skills in a creative way instead of just giving them instructions.

Whilst beta-testing with schools in the UK, our prototype has already been shown to inspire girls to become researchers, teachers, problem solvers, writers, and designers, as well as coders. We partnered with MIT this year, after winning their global Solve challenge, and we have also started holding coding workshops for girls, in Syria and Lebanon.

We’re looking to raise £15,000 to fund a project with award-winning game developers Playerthree to develop E.A.K. for the iPad, building game levels to teach HTML, CSS and Javascript, so that the target audience of girls aged 8–13 can learn to design their own simple websites.

The Kickstarter project has a range of pledge levels from simple access to the iPad version of the game, through to donating licences for schools or organisations, to a corporate sponsor level donation.

There’s plenty of research tells us that girls find coding boring and aimed too much at boys and we want to redress that balance. We’re making an extended version of our game that we already know girls love and we want to bring it to as many as possible. If we can get the right level of support, we can really tackle the gender imbalance in tech at the very earliest stages.

So help us reach our target and enable us to tackle the gender issue in tech from the bottom up. Pledges and support are hugely welcome, of course, but sharing it to your own networks is really valuable too.

Thanks, and wish us luck…