Kids are amazing at learning new technologies. They can learn to use smartphones or tablets before they are able to talk. But merely using new technologies does not enable them to get creative as well.
“It’s almost as if they can read but not write with new technologies,” said the MIT professor Mitchel Resnick during his 2013 TED Talk. He heads the Lifelong Kindergarten Group, which develops new technologies for creativity at MIT’s Media Lab.
For information technology, coding is like writing. So hundreds of organizations and websites have been founded that help kids learn to code, or write and create in the digital world.
“We hear repeatedly from kids that it is more fun to make a game than to play a game and that is really exciting,” said Jocelyn Leavitt, co-founder and CEO of Hopscotch, a platform that makes computer programming fun and accessible to children.
Hopscotch is a block-based mobile programming application that helps kids easily build games and animated artwork. Through the process, kids can become familiar with coding fundamentals.
