A is for Alien
As a Web Developer at LAW Creative I take a particular interest in the digital world and in my other favourite role as a very hands on uncle to a ten year old boy, I’ve also become interested in how digital is taught to the younger generation.
Over the last couple of years there have been numerous attempts to raise awareness and provide solutions to the glaring lack of knowledge in digital technology in our schools. Governments, Employers and Technology leaders have realised that the curriculum isn’t providing enough training to the upcoming generations as they enter this new digital world.
If I look back to my own secondary school ICT education, it was lacking in substance and ultimately comprised of learning an early version of Microsoft Office. But by that point I was already pulling code out of a Commodore 64 manual trying desperately to create a video game. I wasn’t interested in learning how to type up dull office documents – I wanted to know how to get into the machine and start creating with it.
Remembering this frustration, and in order to give my ten year old nephew a head start in the digital arena I try to nurture his love of graphics and video games. Introductions to Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash and Anime Studio have been met with mixed success, as the steep learning curves and labyrinth like interfaces have resulted in a fidgety boy staring back at me with a pained face, as if to say ‘why is this so complicated’. And these programs are the ones with a user interface, imagine the challenge of trying to get a child through the barren land of pure code!
So when I came home one evening and my nephew announced that he was going to ‘code school’ (an after school initiative that his primary school had introduced), let’s just say I was sceptical.
Two weeks later I returned from LAW Creative and was met with a jubilant boy wanting to show me his latest creation. When I viewed the screen I was genuinely staggered. Within the course of four hours of learning, I was witnessing a ten year old piece together an interactive video game that included his own sprites, sounds, animation and gameplay. This was made even more profound as at the time I was also working on my first mini game using Javascript which had taken me 400 pages of book learning over the course of 6 months of weekends!
How was this even possible? Enter Scratch – a tool and programming language developed by the MIT Media Lab with the aim (and success) of helping children program and share interactive media. This amazing tool removes the barrier of having to learn a very complex and dry programming language in order to create interactive digital content.
What’s even more remarkable is that the fundamentals of computer programming are kept, rather than hidden from the child and are an active part of creation! Programming terminology like Events, Operators, Variables, and Control Statements are all present in colourful drag and drop blocks that by shape guide the user into locking the correct pieces of the program together.
In my eyes this piece of technology is truly ground-breaking and potentially the effects will be felt in many years to come, as it allows children to exercise and grow their imagination and creativity in the digital realm. It provides a central hub that encompasses illustration, music composition, interactivity, storyboarding and animation, whilst providing a solid foundation to build on in ‘hard coding’.
At LAW Creative we are constantly coming up with creative ways to push technology and have recently won a special commendation for best website at the HMA awards, where we pushed the traditional conventions of a website to craft an advanced mobile sales presentation tool.
If you are looking for new and creative ways to incorporate digital solutions into your business get in touch today.