ScratchJr: Coding for Young(er) Kids

Project:  ScratchJr: Coding for Young Kids

Creator:  Mitchel Resnick at Lifelong Kindergarten at MIT

Description:  Coding for kids is all the rage these days -- seems like you can't go through Kickstarter pages without running into at least one of these every week (here's one of my favorites).  But it's also true that the Lifelong Kindergarten lab at MIT has been interested in the subject for a long time, most visibly in the creation of Scratch, a web-based programming interface for kids ages 8 and up.  Now, with ScratchJr, they hope to expand that work down to kids ages 5 through 7.

The website is free, so rewards are for ancillary items such as t-shirts, stickers, and seminars.  But if ScratchJr is as cool as its elder sibling, it's worth pitching in.

Primo: Pre-Literacy Programming Robot Interface

Project:   Primo - Teaching programming logic to children age 4 to 7

Creator:  Primo

Description:  Teaching kids programming and programming logic is the In Thing these days, but one of the cooler implementations of it appears to come from the UK-based firm Primo.  They've designed a tiny robot (Cubetto) with an appealing puzzle-piece form, which can be controlled via an interface board "programmed" by putting in blocks which serve as non-verbal blocks of programming code.  It's an expensive toy, perhaps (the full assembled kit costs 160 pounds), and one which reminds me of trying to get a remote-controlled car moving, but one with a little more brainy heft.  Fun stuff.

Robot Turtles: Board Game Designed To Teach Programming

Project Title:  Robot Turtles: The Board Game for Little Programmers

Creator:  Dan Shapiro

Description:  As soon as I saw this project, I thought it would do well and while my kids are a shade too old to get much out of this, I am a minor backer, one of the first.  I did, however, think I'd get a chance to interview Shapiro for the Bake Sale podcast.

That was before he'd attracted more than 3,700 backers only about 72 hours into the project.  Shapiro -- a Google programmer who took some time off this summer to develop the game -- is gonna need all the time he can get fulfilling the project without spending time talking to me.   So I'm just going to plug it here.

What is this thing that's become a raging Kickstarter success?  It's a board game designed (subtly) to teach programming concepts.  Turtles and debugging.  Awesome. 

App Camp For Girls: Non-Profit Camp Teaching Girls To Program iOS Apps

Project Title:  App Camp For Girls

Creator : Jean McDonald (App Camp for Girls)

Description:  It's a little sad that there has to be a fundraiser to establish a non-profit camp to encourage girls to get into programming.  Software is such an important part of our lives these days that one might hope that their wouldn't be massive gender disparity in terms of who's coding and that these camps targeted at older tween and early teenaged girls wouldn't be necessary.

But the disparity does  exist, and so here we are.  And while the camp right now is set up for a Portland-area event only, if it goes well (and they raise enough money), they're hoping to expand to other areas of the country in 2014.  Hear, hear.

 

LightUp: Electronic Building Blocks and Augmented Reality App

Project Title : LightUp: Learn by Making (with Augmented Reality)

Creator : Josh Chan (LightUp)

Description : I've been a supporter of this project since day 1, if I recall correctly, and though I wanted to get Josh and the LightUp folks onto the Bake Sale podcast, we just couldn't get our schedules to sync.  No wonder, too, because their project's been a stunning success, raising more than $100,000 compared to their $50,000 goal.

What is LightUp?  It's a little bit like Snap Circuits in its use of kid-safe electronic components (e.g., complete a circuit and turn on a light) except that the LightUp adds to that an augmented reality app via your smartphone that will allow kids to "virtually" see the electricity flowing through the circuit -- or not flowing, if you and your kids have failed to construct the circuit properly.  That's the sort of thing that I think really makes the educational possibilities of this project shine.

There are lots of different types of kits available starting at $39, and the fancier ones will even allow you and your kids to do some Arduino programming.  If you'd like to support the project, though, you'd better hurry as it ends Sunday night, June 30.

The Code Witch: A Pre-Teen Fantasy Novel With a Female Programmer

Description : Programmer Ada Lovelace is having a bit of a Kickstarter moment.  There was Wollstonecraft, a YA novel about Lovelace and Mary Shelley (programming and  steampunk), and now a novel from a pair of Stanford University seniors, Sarah Sterman and Elise Guinee-Cooper are writing The Code Witch .  It's a pre-teen fantasy novel featuring a female programmer, whose setup is described as "a dragon shows up at Ada's door, starting an adventure of magic and coding."

Miss Mary Mack might very well be the perfect target audience for this novel -- interested in reading and math, and probably susceptible to being swayed into coding.  Even though my coding days never got past computer science classes in high school, I'm excited about the idea that more women should be coding, and every little bit, even fictional narratives, can change the culture.  $8 gets you the e-book, $15, the paperback.