Another Gentle Nudge at Teachers and Schools
A few years back I wrote a post called “On Kids, Parenting and the Real Time Web” encouraging schools to take advantage of online tools to complement classroom teaching and facilitate homework assignments. It’s great to finally see them adopting tools like Google Earth to teach geography and visualize historic sites, and Mathletics - an excellent way for kids to complete homework assignments in a gamified way.
My latest educational obsession revolves around teaching kids the key tools for creativity and empowerment for the next 50 years: software development, design, and robotics. While a number of governmental and educational bodies have been publishing discussion documents on the subject (read: see you in 10 years or move to Estonia) - there a number of emerging online services and volunteer programs that can accelerate their introduction at home, in the classroom or even in your local community. Here's a snapshot of the current movers:
Scratch - a wonderful software development environment for kids built by MIT. Very intuitive, it’s a great tool to teach kids aged 7+ the building blocks of software development while creating their own animations and games. A fun way to start is to combine it with “The Super Scratch Programming Adventure”, a comic-book like guide written by the LEAD project (Learning through Engineering, Art and Design) - thanks Hilary Mason for the suggestion!
Coder Dojo - a movement to create free coding clubs for young people around the world. Taught and organized by volunteers who follow a “keeping it cool” dogma, this is a must check-out if you’re interested in either joining, organizing or teaching a local dojo. In the UK, a very similar program called Code Club is worth looking into as well. Schools should proactively seek our Coder Dojos or Code Club volunteers to run weekly after-school sessions.
Khan Academy - Salman Khan’s brilliant videos have been making advanced education free and accessible to everyone for some time. Computer Science is one of many tracks available and a great way to get started with design, animation and programming basics.
Codecademy & Learnstreet - while not designed for kids, Codecademy and Learnstreet make it dead easy to learn how to code. An hour a week will get any parent or teacher the fluency to support their learning kids (and why not, build your own games, apps or websites).
Arduino and other Open Source Hardware - and finally, robotics. With the advent of Arduino, an open source hardware and software platform for the creation of interactive objects, a number of kids-centric projects have leveraged the technology to introduce the principles of robotics. A recent discovery is RoboBrrd, a cute bird robot that gives kids hands on experience with mechanical and electrical engineering, and programming. I'm also unlikely to resist the temptation at giving the Lego inspired littleBits a go - their starter and holiday kits seem perfect for kids (and adults).
On a personal wish list note, I’d love to see a rich adventure game like environment where levelling up is achieved by learning principles of coding, design, user interaction, cryptography, machine intelligence and big data. Looking forward to seeing what Kuato Studios comes up with in this space. Alternatively, time to nudge a talented hacker and game designer duo to launch a new Kickstarter or Indiegogo project...
