How my journey began

A fair few years ago now, my husband (who works in technology) had purchased a Raspberry Pi.

A Raspberry Pi is a credit card sized computer which has made technology accessible to all. The Raspberry Pi Foundation is seeking to equip our future generations with the toolkit and skills necessary to be tomorrow’s technologists.  

Because of this he was bugging me for ages to head to one of these events hosted by Raspberry Pi. These events were designed for families to celebrate all the technological accomplishments of the Raspberry Pi community. Consequently, with nothing better to do on 30th June 2018 my husband, our two daughters and I went to Cambridge Junction to attend Raspberry Fields. To emphasise: I did not know how much this event would change my life.

Once we’d entered the Festival (which was very well organised) we saw so many interesting things which caught the attentions of our daughters. Basically, they were transfixed - as was I.

It was at this point that I knew I had to somehow harness this enthusiasm of theirs and continue their journey into technology long after the Raspberry Pi Festival. I left feeling inspired.

As soon as I returned home, I spoke to a friend, Dr Val Critten, about what I’d seen and how my daughters reacted, also, she just so happens to have a doctorate in Education. Combining her theoretical ideas with my practical applications and ideas on ‘how’ we could teach young children to code, we started to formulate some plans. I specifically didn’t want screens. For three reasons, the first was that laptops or tablets were an extra resource to pay for, insure, store. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, I was conscious of the effects of screen time on children and wanted to explore alternative methods to introduce the foundations of coding to children. And thirdly, when screens are introduced, there’s an expectation that the children will instinctively know what to do, there may be things to read which precludes many preschool age children. Therefore, I wanted to strip everything right back, get ‘back to basics’ and think about what a child of this age likes to do…play.

To summarise, we decided to see if children (specifically 2 to 4-year olds) were able to learn to code through structured play. So, we spent a summer holiday running a group consisting of four girls introducing them to the foundations we feel are required to learn coding. We didn’t even look at a computer screen! It was classed as a pilot as we just weren’t sure how the girls would react to our ideas but the most compelling evidence to our success was they kept asking when the next session was going to be! 

In the same way our pilot group was successful, the local nursery heard about our sessions from the girls in the pilot group. Thus, we were invited to do some 6 week long sessions at the nursery to teach some of the children there. This was again very successful because the children were able to complete structured play tasks associated with coding (and have fun at the same time!)

All in all, it seemed parents and nursery staff were interested in equipping children with the tools required for the digital future.  

Are you interested in how to teach your child coding with no screens? Get in touch with me to find out more.