Wednesday, June 8, 2016

Educating our Digital Natives

There was an article on Wall Street Journal that I found extremely interesting. It is about a new tablet application that allows young kids to practice coding skills using blocks. The Osmo Coding kit comes with basic blocks for move, jump, and grab. The children can string together the blocks and add variables and loops to create a complex scene. Once the kid has put together the blocks, they can execute the script by pushing a start button on the green block. 

 
I think this is really amazing because now kid's can start to understand some of the behind the scene stuff of what they play with everyday. Just like Danah Boyd says in her book, our youth uses technology everyday but they do not always necessarily understand how it actually works. Our society does seem to moving toward a more technological world and I think that it is great that companies want to encourage that kids start to learn some of these skills.