Coding <= Confidence

Techno Ninjas was launched in May 2014 with a pilot Summer Camp held in the last week of July and first week of August. We opened our doors to children aged between 9 and 14 who were interested in technology, computers and programming. We didn't really know what to expect, so it was all a bit nerve wracking! However, we loved it, the children loved it and the parents loved that the kids loved it :) Overall, it was a tremendous success.

We got the idea after Karen helped run an after school Raspberry Pi club with two of our own children and some of their friends from school. Karen quickly realised that she really enjoyed running the club and could see the potential and how much the kids loved coming. The only slight issue was that the RPi units were somewhat temperamental and prone to crashing. This could be disastrous to a 10 year old who has just spend the last 30 minutes inputting code or using Scratch to make a game, to have it disappear because he hasn't saved it! Yes, of course they were reminded to save...

So we hacked out a plan. We would concentrate on Scratch (which could be done online), forget Python (for now) as the kids were not that engaged with it and also to look for other activities we could do with them during a whole day and in some cases whole week of coming to a camp with us.

Techno Ninjas was born!

During the two weeks we saw kids learning to program, get excited about making their creations come to life. They worked together in teams to create stop-frame animated movies. They created their own game controllers, piano staircase, tennis racquet guitar and pizza box operation game using a MaKey MaKey. They even made a giant jumping game controller out of a gymnastics spring board, a box and some foil to play Super Mario brothers!

However, the one thing that has surprised us the most out of all the skills they learned and continue to learn when they attend our Saturday clubs, is confidence. Most of them worry about doing it wrong, they worry that if they don't do it right then there might be a problem. Their hands shoot up every five minutes asking for help, when we get there we realise that most of the time they don't actually need our help, they just want reassurance that they're doing it right. Gradually though, they realise that they can't break it. If their code isn't right, all that will happen is that it won't work - or won't work as they expect. They start to look at the code and work out why it's not working as it should...all on their own! When this happens it's amazing to watch. They get so much out of that autonomy, they are so proud of what they've done ALL ON THEIR OWN!

We've had children with Aspergers, Dyslexia and other learning issues and they have all loved it and got so much out of it. They can show their parents what they have done, show their siblings and know that they did it!

What they all find is that the best way to learn is through trial and error, that failing isn't failing, but it's all part of the learning process. You don't need to get something right straight away, learn by doing and most of all trying.

We love what we do, they love what we're showing them and all that leads to CONFIDENCE! Programming can be fun, we have proved this beyond a doubt.