Erase All Kittens game aims to inspire girls to learn to code

We’re quite late on this, but if you’re looking for an excellent Kickstarter to back this side of Christmas, check out Erase All Kittens. You may already know the website, which blends gaming with a story to inspire girls to learn computer programming skills.

Now its creators are raising £15,000 to turn it into “an epic Mario-meets-Minecraft style game” for mobile devices and PCs. We say ‘raising’ — they’ve actually hit their goal already, and with just under three days to go, are pushing on with their plans.

The story taps in to a perennial internet favourite: kittens. Peeved at their popularity online, a nefarious group called Operation E.A.K. is catnapping internet kittens with plans to destroy them – unless the game’s young players can rescue them with their fledgling coding skills.

Besides bringing Erase All Kittens to new devices, the Kickstarter campaign is raising money to add more features, levels, characters and extra programming languages to the game.

“The game has a huge focus on creativity,” explains the crowdfunding pitch. “Our aim is to bridge the gap between girls learning the concepts of coding (ie. computational thinking), and being able to apply practical knowledge in a creative way.”

This isn’t just about girls. “Erase All Kittens is for all humans above the age of eight,” it explains. But there is a mission behind it to make sure that girls in particular feel encouraged and inspired to try programming, rather than seeing it as something mainly for boys.

55% of the website version’s 120,000 players are girls, so the team is having some success there. Erase All Kittens has also been finding its way in to schools in the UK, as part of the bigger push to help children try programming long before they get to big school.

A pledge of £10 will get you and your children early access to the iPad version of Erase All Kittens, which the team hopes to have ready by April 2018. Higher pledges can buy Erase All Kittens accounts for more children (including entire classes) as well as workshops for schools. Give it a look on Kickstarter before the crowdfunding campaign ends!