photo: Nigerias Wizkid coding two bottles of Champagne:
Learn-to-code
startups abound these days, but one in particular is focusing on the
very young and is having some success in elementary schools around the
country — even underserved schools with no budgets for STEM but a great
need for better tools.
The
startup is Tynker; it makes a web-based learning platform and a visual
programming language for teachers and kids in K-12 classrooms. In a
discussion with its co-founder, we found out why teaching kids how to
code is so important to him.
Krishna
Vedati came to the U.S. in 1991 as a grad student from India. He got a
master’s in computer science, then rode the dotcom wave at a handful of
startups, including one he founded himself. After IPOs and acquisitions
and the eventual bust, he found himself a decade older and wiser but
still thinking about solving big-picture problems with technology — this
time, a bit closer to home.
“I
have two kids, nine and six, a boy and a girl. And they’re exposed to
so much technology,” he said in a phone chat yesterday. “But their
schools haven’t changed in 50 years. They’re teaching the same stuff in
different ways.”
Especially
at schools with lower budgets, the tools for learning are antiquated by
modern standards. And many more schools, as Vedati’s peers at Code.org
would point out, have no budgets for technology or computer science at
all.
The
solution, Vedati decided, would have to be a free service — something
web-based so kids could practice at home and teachers wouldn’t have to
deal with unwieldy downloads. And unlike other curricula, it should
definitely be based on stuff kids already like.
“If
you go into middle school, they’re all into games; they want to create
games,” he said. “In high school, they’re all about social interaction. …
So in Tynker, they do fun stuff, but they learn programming.”
To
clarify, these kids learn the logic of coding. Tynker contains a visual
programming language; that is, it uses the building blocks of
algorithms without all the tricks of the developer’s trade — curly
braces, semicolons, seemingly inconsequential stuff that, when misplaced
or missing, can screw up days’ or even months’ worth of work.
“Syntax
is not important,” said Vedati. “It’s something you pick up. If you
look at algorithms and write in pseudo-language, that’s a logical
language. And it forces them to think in terms of solving problems,
worrying about how to write it. And over time, they learn to translate
into syntax, as well, slowly migrating in PHP or Python or what have
you.”
So
to start kids out, Tynker focuses on the more important but more basic
concepts all programming languages have in common, like how loops work,
how to solve computing problems, and how to order and structure tasks
for machines
Altogether, he continued, it’s totally in line with the STEM stuff kids are already required to learn.
“Computer
science originates from mathematics. If they’re learning math, they
should also learn logic, and this is one way to learn logic. … We wanted
to really focus on creating algorithmic thinking, to make a playground
on which programming in a byproduct.”
So
far, Vedati and the rest of the Tynker team have worked with schools in
L.A., New York, Texas, and Silicon Valley. He said they found teachers
were already looking for computer literacy solutions, and a lot of the
schools they spoke to were using different systems.
“We
actually went to many schools before we deployed the software and
looked at the problems for teachers who wanted to incorporate
programming into their classes. … We wanted to simplify the process, so
we built the whole thing in the cloud.”
Also,
a web-based product means Tynker can continuously improve it and
upgrade it, tweaking for how kids use it. Right now, the system figures
out what they don’t understand and gives them more puzzles, tasks, and
games until they have their personal lightbulb moments, either in school
or at home.
Other
tools include lesson plans, interactive tutorials, project management
software for assigning and grading projects, and advanced
lesson-creating tools — all of which are free for teachers and students
to use. Tynker is experimenting with “pro” features like analytics —
which could be massively useful for school districts trying to figure
out how to up their STEM game or prepare high school grads for technical
jobs.
And
making the tools free, Vedati said, is a big part of Tynker’s vision to
bring better STEM education to all children, not just the privileged
ones who have access to amazing computer labs and over-educated parents.
“There are haves and have-nots — the have-nots need to have access to this stuff for free,” he said.
“I
paid $900 for my son to go to coding camp at Stanford. Giving that
value to the kids who just can’t afford it, it allows them to build a
lot of interesting stuff.
“Our
goal is to educate millions and millions of kids, and at that scale, we
can make some money from some schools. But every teacher and student
gets lots of content and videos and case studies for free. We can tell
you how to run it as an after-school or lunchtime program. We basically
want to help them out, to package this knowledge into reuseable units.
We’re hoping that teachers across the country start using it. There’s a
social conscience to it.”
His
vision recalls that of Code.org’s founder and of Treehouse founder Ryan
Carson, who is bringing his own learn-to-code platform for a slightly
older demographic into high schools around the country. At the high
school level, Carson and Treehouse are trying to fix the engineering
shortage of the here-and-now, starting with 16- or 17-year-old at-risk
young people.
“A
lot of these children don’t know these jobs exist. Their parents and
their schools don’t know about them, either,” said Carson in a recent
interview with VentureBeat.
“So
when we tell them, ‘You could get a job at a company like Facebook, you
could be earning $100,000 plus, they pay for your insurance, they feed
you, and you can work from home and wear casual clothes.’ They’re like,
‘What are you talking about?’”
In
that way, a program like Treehouse implemented in the last year or two
of high school can act as damage control — both for an industry needing
more workers and in the lives of young adults with very few options for
the lives on which they’re about to embark.
Vedati,
on the other hand, is planning for the long term by working with kids
much younger, much earlier, trying to educate them about those options
when they still have years to form opinions and create and live their
own dreams.
“If you close your eyes and think about the world 10 years from now, it will be completely different,” Vedati said.
“Kids
will have computing everywhere. Doctors will be using computing to make
decisions. Jobs will require more technology. … The new jobs that will
be created won’t be just programming jobs. But can you think about
organizing data? Information and computation is coming to every field.”
And that, dear readers, is why your eight-year-old should be coding
mice
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