Is Your Child Coding Yet?

Is Your Child Coding Yet? New Building Blocks Teach Programming Basics

Children can use plastic Osmo Coding blocks to command a cute character on an iPad screen

A mirror attaches to your iPad so that its camera can see the Osmo coding blocks your child arranges.

When parents these days hear the old saying “The jobs of tomorrow haven’t been invented yet,” they tend to add, “so my child had better learn to code.” As software has redefined a range of industries and professions, many parents are rushing to make sure their children learn the building blocks of computer programming.

Toy and game developers have responded. One recent entry—and, for young children, one of the best—is Osmo Coding, by Tangible Play Inc. Using plastic bricks that represent computer commands, children arrange “scripts” that the iPad’s camera interprets as instructions for a cute on-screen character to act upon.

When the first Osmo kits appeared in 2015, they made a splash because they gave children a way to interact with the iPad using physical objects. One reason for the runaway success of products like Lego is that children physically manipulate the toys, a trait that early childhood education experts smile upon. Parents who feel guilty that their children stare too idly at glowing pixels can use Osmo to turn screentime into physical playtime.

From the start, Osmo’s lineup included sets of numbers, letters and the colorful Chinese geometric tiles known as tangrams. The iPad sits upright in Osmo’s base, with a red mirror attached to the iPad camera that lets the tablet look down on a play area where children manipulate pieces. (This is an iPad-exclusive product.)

In a math game, players position numbers to win exotic fish. With letters, they play a Hangman-like word-guessing game. Using tangrams, they create increasingly complicated animals and other objects.

But all along, the developers of Osmo also had envisioned a coding game based on the same principles. The kit (with base and mirror for $75, sold separately for $49) includes blocks needed for basic gaming: move, jump and grab, for starters. Children string them together, add variables such as numbers and loops, then push the play button on a green brick to execute their script. On the iPad, a creature named Awbie follows these mini computer programs, navigating increasingly complicated mazes and obstacles.


Awbie started out as a robot, but the developers realized that robots tend to skew a bit masculine, so they morphed Awbie into a delightfully gender-neutral character. “Girls think it’s a girl and boys think it’s a boy,” says Pramod Sharma, co-founder and CEO of Tangible Play.

As children build out their scripts, tiles light up on screen, showing a preview of Awbie’s movements. Tweak the code, and the preview changes with it. While most pieces are straightforward, there’s a more advanced piece meant for conditional situations. For instance, if, while walking forward six squares, Awbie hits a bush before finishing, it can be instructed to jump over the obstacle.

Once children begin moving up levels, they collect rainbow-colored strawberries, beaver-guarded tree stumps and other commodities to build up their campsite. They end up with bigger tents, crazier campfires and a corral where, eventually, their prize pets can live.

So that’s it: Buy your child this game and they’ll soon get a job at Google or Facebook. It’s that simple. Except it isn’t, of course. The purpose of Osmo Coding is to teach the basic concepts of programming, but it doesn’t go deep enough to teach programming itself. “It’s about how you put your thoughts together in a way that computers understand,” Mr. Sharma says. “It’s similar to learning a language.”

Mr. Sharma, 35, would know: Having grown up in a rural part of India a three-hour drive from New Delhi, he learned both coding and English only when he got to college. Now in the U.S. and an eight-year veteran of Google, Mr. Sharma is providing his children with a different kind of upbringing. His 6-year-old daughter is chief product tester for the company. (His 2-year-old son isn’t quite ready for Osmo.)

Mr. Sharma left Google to cofound Tangible Play partly in response to the pressure that parents feel. He says he understands the reason for paranoia among parents—“If every kid in India and China is learning coding, it’s natural that parents would feel that.” Still, he says, Osmo’s goal is to provide educational toys that help children build confidence, regardless of the skill.

There’s another reason products like Lego are so well-respected: They’re open-ended. Children may follow instructions to build a spaceship or shopping mall, but they also use the pieces to design their own vehicles and buildings.

Mitchel Resnick, MIT Media Lab’s professor of learning research and a co-creator of the grade-school-level programming tool Scratch, says that open-endedness is key. “Tangible approaches to coding are only useful for the simplest of activities,” he wrote in an email. “If we want children to become truly fluent with coding (and to fall in love with coding), we need to give them opportunities to tell stories.”

Scratch—which starts with a blank backdrop, a main character and an abundance of code commands to string together—takes a lot more time to get oriented, and is recommended for ages 8 and up, rather than Osmo’s 6-and-up age group. Nevertheless, with over 15 million shared projects, Scratch is a proven way for students to program wildly imaginative games and videos.

To Mr. Sharma, coding “is a journey, and we want to focus on the early journey.” He does plan to add features that give children more creative input with the game. There’s already a purple “magic” block that players can use to grow flowers all over Awbie’s world. The flowers stay in place when children return to each spot. In the future, children could edit the game scenes even more.

It would be hard for a parent to mistake Osmo Coding for a one-way ticket to Silicon Valley riches. But there’s joy to be had in seeing a child like my 5-year-old son take to it, carefully stringing together the six or seven commands that will steer Awbie past trees, around a slimy slug and straight to the treasure chest. Time to count up some rainbow strawberries and move on to the next level! Those Silicon Valley riches can wait.



source: www.wsj.com