Creative Coding With Saturday Kids

Over the last year I must admit we’ve fallen off the bandwagon in our efforts to encourage the kids to learn to code. After completing an introductory book on Scratch, it’s been difficult to keep progressing in a meaningful way. I’ve never wanted the girls to learn to code just for the sake of it; the holy grail is getting them interested to explore the use of code to achieve their own ends. But realistically this is all a bit chicken-and-egg: without some understanding of programming, they will not be able to imagine how to integrate it into their work and play. 

I’ve discovered that most pathways into coding are not really aligned with activities my kids naturally gravitate toward – ie. making art, and singing/dancing around the house – but during the December holidays they discovered coding in Kano at a holiday camp called “Become a Rock Star Code DJ” at Saturday Kids. Both girls loved it. This is coding for artists and musicians, for kids who like to move around and be noisy. 

Kano is similar to Scratch in that it uses a block-based coding interface, but one of the main differences appears to be that Kano is geared up to simplify the process of programming hardware – microphones, speakers, motion sensors, LED panels, mouse, etc. which then allows for a level of physical interactivity. And that makes it a lot more fun. The girls especially enjoyed using the motion sensors to create variable inputs for their computer graphics, allowing their shapes and colours to be easily manipulated by a wave of the hand. Concurrently they were also able to code simple beats and rhythms and again use the motion sensors to “play” their sounds and sync them to the graphics. They were also able to create light pixel animations and upload them to an LED array called the Pixel Kit.

It was like watching mini EDM VJs at play.

The act of creating digital art and music is a surprisingly good vehicle for learning about coding. Kids quickly pick up how to use the coding blocks to express their visual ideas mathematically simply because they have to. It’s an engaging way (especially for visual learners) to play around with basic arithmetic operations, coordinates, scale, percentage, time, and so on; I was surprised how motivated Little Miss was to understand coordinates in order to produce her LED pixel kit animations.

They also quickly learn how to use the script to make their lives easier – using loops and lerp and conditions to create variation whilst reducing the need to tediously program similar lines over and over. Art and music provide a lot of scope to explore pattern-making, which is a very natural platform for practicing computational thinking. Obviously the preset coding blocks limit what is possible in Kanoworld, but there’s more than enough variety for young kids to progress to quite challenging projects.

The kids really enjoyed this camp and now often ask to play on Kano at home – and we even managed to borrow back some of the kit from Saturday Kids to make the video! 

We’ve only scratched the surface of Kanoworld – in addition to art and music there’s quite a lot of scope to create games and mini devices which receive real weather / satellite data, and other interesting projects. Hopefully this burst of coding enthusiasm won’t disappear too fast now that the school year has started up again. I really wish the school could incorporate some of this stuff into their curriculum. Miss Chu has just started P4 and there’s still no sign of coding being introduced. Perhaps they can’t fit in into an already-packed curriculum, or they can’t train enough teachers to roll it out. So for now, we’ll have to find our own ways to keep the interest alive.