Tech Tent: Learning to code during lockdown

Could one of the few upsides to the current health crisis be that a generation of young people acquire new digital skills?

On this week's Tech Tent podcast, we hear how parents are using the lockdown to get children interested in coding.

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Take Ruth Moore and her sons Reuben and Jonah, aged eight and five.

Stuck at home in Oxford and looking to vary the boys' diet of schoolwork, Ruth - who, full disclosure, is my wife's niece - started thinking about introducing the boys to coding.

"Probably behind it was the thought that these are languages that it makes so much sense to know," she says.

"And I know so little of it myself. I can do tiny little bits of HTML and very, very simple things. But I never learned anything like this systematically."

HTML - short for Hypertext Markup Language - is the language that powers websites.

Ruth looked online for help and found plenty of inspiration.

Puppies to the rescue
"It's just amazing to see the number of places that are really keen to help kids get a sense of what coding means and what they can do with it, and engage with it in a really playful way."

Ruth started with code.org, a US campaign to get children there coding. It offers all sorts of resources to anyone looking to get started.

Reuben and Jonah had a look at the options and immediately picked a game called Puppy Adventures.

"A pup gets lost and then he finds lots of stuff," Reuben explains. Along the way, simple coding concepts are introduced. I ask what he thinks about the whole idea.

"I liked it quite a bit," he says. "And I'd like to do it again some more."

Indeed, Ruth found she was pushing at an open door, and the two boys have now moved on to other coding exercises.