Sophia, 9 years old, shows off the new game she’s working on. “You click here as fast you can to make the bullying message go away.” It’s an anti-cyberbullying game, and she’s building it in an after school coding class offered by Power Up Tech Academy in Chicago, in which she is allowed to work on any project she chooses. Elsie, in the same class, says she wants to build an app to teach her 5 year old brother math skills. The other students work on their games and other projects with remarkable persistence, coming back to the same project week after week to get it just right.
This is not a special group of kids, even though they are great kids. This is what happens when kids get their hands on tools to build the technology that they have been using since they were toddlers. They have great ideas coming out of years of experience as a game player and app user, they see ways to improve their world because they interact with that world through so many different apps, and they are motivated to learn and create because the end result is meaningful and real to them.
Coding classes for kids are wonderful for many reasons. The skills learned are very practical - logical thinking, problem solving, understanding technology. But the real magic comes from the kids themselves. They are able to use coding to explore and express the ideas that are interesting and important to them. They are making and building their own learning, and it comes out in very real ways.
In another Power Up Tech Academy class, kindergarteners play a board game called Robot Turtles. There is lots of giggling and fun, but when each kid’s turn comes they think and concentrate very hard to figure out where their turtle needs to go. They have to select 2 commands at a time, which teaches them to think in sequences, a key skill for programming and broadly applicable in other areas as well. After Robot Turtles, the kids work for a while in ScratchJr, an iPad app. Although they can’t read and write well enough to write stories yet, they can create digital stories with multiple characters and scenes, and use the recording feature to add sounds and dialogue. Today, Andrew has a dragon flying around the library and the librarian running away screaming.
Coding for kids is exploding on the education landscape. It is the "new literacy”, a critical 21st century skill that most of our schools still don’t teach. Some countries, though, are starting to bring it inside the educational system. Coding is being taught to all children in Britain, Estonia and Finland from the earliest grades, and strongly advocated in Canada, Australia and here in the United States. But with limited time in the school day and limited specialist teachers, it may be quite a while before our kids have access to year-round, quality coding instruction at the elementary level.
Unfortunately, for parents of kids who are ready to learn to code now, there are very few options available. One-time introductory events are starting to become more common, but the availability of multi-week coding classes to build these complex skills over time is extremely spotty.
The lack of such options in Chicago is why Power Up Tech Academy was started. Their vision is to make coding available to all kids in grades K-8 in Chicago. They are currently offering classes through partners such as Alphonsus Academy and Pickle's Playroom, and in April they will open Chicago's first year-round Kids Coding Center.
If your child is ready to start learning to code, check out Power Up Tech Academy’s Chicago classes and summer camps, with offerings for kids from grades K-8. Spring 2015 classes start mid-April in Lincoln Square, Clybourn & Diversey, and Hyde Park. Summer camps are available at Clybourn & Diversey. Visit http://powerupta.com for more info and to register, or email at tamasin@diaryofasahm.com with your questions about kids coding!
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