Coding for Kids
By Tomas Durkin, Exhibits Coordinator, Children’s Creativity Museum, San Francisco
At the Children’s Creativity Museum, we strive to inspire our visitors to transition from being everyday consumers of media to producers of media. With our Creative Coding Field Trips, we use Tynker to help students realize that they can actually make the games that they love playing so much!
One of the main challenges with our field trip program is that we only have 2 hours to introduce a class of students to a brand new creative medium. While we don’t expect them to be expert programmers by the end of a field trip, we strive to light enough of a spark for them to want to do more – to try programming on their own at home or back at school. After exposing the inner workings of how simple video games are made, students won’t look at their smart phones, tablets, or computers in the same way again.
Tynker’s system of tutorials, exercises, puzzles and quizzes are what really set it apart from other block-based visual coding programs. Their lessons help us to effectively scaffold the Creative Coding field trip for 3rd through 8th graders in a short amount of time. For example, we can introduce grade-level appropriate math concepts that relate to features that students want to add to their games.
We also value Tynker’s game-making approach because it gets students engaged right away. The merits of using video games as a teaching tool are significant. Most students are unaware of how much math is involved in the games that they love to play. Random numbers make a game more unpredictable and challenging. Geometry is needed to make characters move around the screen in different directions. Basic Algebra is used to keep score. Although they might not be consciously aware of it, by teaching students how make video games, we are also reinforcing mathematics concepts that they are learning back at school. For students who want to add jumping to their games, we can even teach them physics concepts like density, friction, and gravity using Tynker’s built-in physics engine!
In our summer camps, the sequenced progression of concepts taught in each Tynker lesson enable students to gain a strong foundation for programming quickly, so that instructors can introduce additional activities (such as discussing circuits and conductivity with Makey Makey boards), and students can do more with their games during a single week of camp. Using Tynker’s summer camp curriculum, the class can work on level-appropriate tutorials at their own pace, so we can even teach multiple grade levels in the same class! Additionally, we’ve created our own sets of custom Tynker lessons for the museum, to give our students choices about the kinds of games they want to make while ensuring that everyone is exposed to a similar level of programming concepts.
Our programs allows children to refocus their time and energy, which they would otherwise spend playing games on phones, tablets, or consoles, into a medium of creative expression, and Tynker helps us easily achieve our goals. We hope that our Coding Field Trip and Summer Camp experiences instill a lifelong passion for programming.
Editor’s Note: If Children’s Creativity Museum can successfully teach programming with Tynker in a few hours or days, imagine what you could accomplish in a semester or year-long program!
