What Children Can Teach Us About Coding

Redgate’s Code Club for kids ended up teaching their parents to love coding again

Like lots of people in IT and other office-based jobs, I’ve been working from home since the pandemic started to hit in March 2020. In some ways it’s been hard because I’m the technical lead on a software engineering team, and continuing to work in an agile, collaborative way can be difficult via Zoom. In other ways, it’s been interesting because we’ve demonstrated it can work, often remarkably well.

But I’m not just a technical lead, I’m also a father. And for my 8-year-old son, Dougie, things have been tougher. Here in the UK, schools were forced to close for a long time and one of the things he really missed was the lunchtime Code Club classes he’d been taking. Run by teachers, parents and volunteers and supported by Code Club UK, part of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, Code Club is a great initiative to help children to code with a range of really well-planned and thought-out projects.

So naturally, being a software engineer myself, I thought, How hard would it be to organize an online code club for the children of people at Redgate Software? I mentioned it to a few people at work and when someone suggested maybe we should see if parents beyond Redgate would be interested, I thought, No problem at all. Redgate has quite a few followers on Twitter, so we put out a tweet.

What could possibly go wrong?

Panic Stations

What started as an idea to help maybe 10 or so children of the people at Redgate went crazy. By the next morning we had 1,000 sign-ups from kids from all over the world. Not just the U.S. and Europe, but India, Nigeria and Sri Lanka as well. And the sign-ups kept coming in by the hundreds.

Fortunately, the Raspberry Pi Foundation had already done a lot of the hard work for us by creating a series of Code Club class projects for beginners, intermediate and more advanced coders. They were delighted at our suggestion of using them in our online classes, and recording them so that they could be watched later as well.

Redgate also actively encourages staff to give back to the community and when I gave a shout-out for volunteers to help run the classes, there was a huge response with 50 people raising their hands. Within a couple of weeks, we had the sessions planned, with the beginner and intermediate ones using Scratch and a more advanced session learning Python.

There was quite a lot of safeguarding we had to think about as well around talking to other people’s children over Zoom, and we had conversations with the director of Code Club UK and her team to get their input. We wanted to make sure people weren’t sharing their videos and sound and that kind of stuff, but we managed to work our way through it and ensure we were protecting children while sharing some really cool stuff with them.

All Systems Go

On Friday, April 3, Redgate’s Kids Coding Club opened its doors online to hundreds of children aged between 6 and 14, as well as their parents. I wanted the kids themselves to run the sessions for other kids, so they were the presenters and their parents were co-presenters. In the sessions hosted by my son Dougie, he would talk about what we were going to do in the session and explain what things like sprites are. We then worked through the module as a group and if anyone got stuck, they could raise their hands virtually using the Zoom tool and a volunteer would step in to help.

We ended up running six coding club sessions every Friday for 17 weeks while schools were closed. During that time, we taught nearly 800 children from 20 countries how to code, delivered 1,572 hours of learning, and recordings of the classes on YouTube have racked up thousands more views.

What We Learned

What I love about the coding club is that while we were delivering learning, we were learning, too. There were three big lessons for me.

Children love to code

A lot of people think children just want to sit down and play Minecraft or Fortnite, but if you give them the right tools, they absolutely love coding. Scratch, for example, is a block-based visual programming language that’s really easy for children to pick up and start coding with, particularly when you give them fun stuff to do.

Sixty percent of the children we taught were between the ages of 6 and 8 and they loved using Scratch on projects such as Rock Band, Cats, Clone Wars and Boat Race. They coded their own musical instruments, stopped cats falling into holes, saved the Earth from space monsters and navigated a boat to an island. What’s not to love?

Parents love coding, too

Around 40% of the kids who signed up had parents who had never done any programming either, so they were both starting together in front of the computer, which was great. Typical feedback from the parents was that they were surprised that beginning to code isn’t hard, it’s really fun. A lot of them sat with their children for an hour after the lesson and continued to just play about with things and change stuff.

Children can help us be better at coding

There’s this preconception with coding that you have to get it exactly right for it to work, but what’s great about Scratch and other tools is how much freedom the kids had to change the project they were working on. They’d rather use a parrot than a polar bear. They didn’t want it to jump 10 pixels high, but a hundred pixels high. What happened if they asked it to jump minus 10 pixels? They could just poke the thing and play with it, and it was fun to see the little light bulbs going on in the face of the kids—and their parents.

That can teach us about coding, too, because we often go down tramlines and do things the same way, every time, even when we say we’re taking a test-driven development approach to coding. Teaching children how to code was a nice reminder that we should be thinking more like them, poking and pushing things to the limit and doing the unexpected. We’ll end up with better code, and we’ll have more fun, too.