CodeSpeak Labs is making coding picture-books for pre-schoolers
Children as young as five are learning programming skills at school here in England, but could they get started with coding even earlier than that? A company called CodeSpeak Labs suspects they could.
It has created a series of stories for 2–6 year-olds that introduce them to some basic coding concepts, and having tested them in schools, the company is now bundling them together into a book called How to Turn Your Grown-Up into a Robot and Other Coding Stories.
CodeSpeak Labs is raising money on crowdfunding site Kickstarter for the first run of the book, and with a week to go has easily exceeded its original target of $3,000 – at the time of writing it’s past the $19,000 mark.
Founder Jen Chiou explains what she’s up to on the Kickstarter page:
How to Turn Your Grown-Up into a Robot and Other Coding Stories is an old-fashioned picture book with a twist. It’s a physical book that engages the kid reader and encourages them to interact with the book by tapping and choosing from different options, using many of the tactics that make devices so entertaining… Children learn the big concepts while getting used to how code looks visually, so that when they are older they see code as an old friend rather than the intimidating gobbledegook that adult learners see when looking at code for the first time.”
A pledge of $20 or more gets you an e-book version, while $35 or more gets you the hardback book – with higher tiers of pledge if you’re keen and can afford them.
“Our long-term plan is to create a year’s worth of curriculum for parents and teachers, with stories increasing in complexity,” explains Chiou. One thing I like: one of these first stories is based on the kitten in coding app ScratchJr, serving as an introduction to that for children.
