Learning to code in kindergarten?
An hour of code (http://www.code.org) has been a movement largely disseminated in social networks. Thousands of young minds around the globe have been starting to learn and to code. This is great! The world wide software industry needs lots of developers and other technological profiles. Societies and schools are more and more aware that the software industry is strongly here around us reaching every corner of the world. The need for coders, developers, software engineers, etc... for the full range of available channels (desktop, web, mobile, tablets..) is not only unfulfilled, is growing.
In Europe the codeweek initiative (http://codeweek.eu/) has been around for a couple of years now and i had the pleasure to participate last year with "Ruiz Costa Profissional School" presenting a fun session on "Scratch" from MIT (https://scratch.mit.edu/) using the Portuguese version (http://kids.sapo.pt/scratch/).
I have used other programs and web platforms to spread and train starters in the world of programming. Programs like Alice (http://www.alice.org/) from Carnegie Mellon University and BlueJ (http://www.bluej.org/) from university of Kent (supported by Oracle) along with Scratch are great, fun and free desktop tools for trainers. Web platforms like freecodecamp (http://freecodecamp.com ) and codecombat (https://codecombat.com/) are great tools for starters in developing for the internet.
Initiatives like those are indeed more and more welcome in this era of "bits and bytes". Tomorrow i will contribute to codeweek movement and i will have the pleasure to talk to youngsters again at "Ruiz Costa Pofissional School". I want them to hear about the software development "status quo" we are experiencing in Portugal and in Porto my lovely city (that is as great as Pittsburgh :) ). To do that, i will talk to them about some trends in platforms and tools, focusing on individuals and interactions that will lead to a brief introduction on Agile and Scrum, the fun way, like the young minds love (note that i am not talking about age :) ).
and what about the kindergarten?... well, there is this codeweek event (http://events.codeweek.eu/view/4912/programas-a-brincar-joguinhos-de-progracao-no-jardim-de-infancia/) that will use ScratchJr (http://www.scratchjr.org/) to play around with pre-school childrens! Amazing!
As we say in Portugal: "De pequenino se torce o penino" (do not try google translate on this...)
Cheers!
