SCOTTIE GO! – An amazing interactive board game to teach the language of coding to children. Does that even make sense? IT DOES!

Every child has to be a programmer! That’s of course false, and I would like to clarify it at the very beginning. Not every child has to be a programmer, not everyone has to understand the language of coding, and write codes to create new apps. But every child should learn to think logically, and understand cause-effect relations. Both children and adults lack these skills.

Scottie Go! Is a combination of cardboard puzzles pieces and an app for smartphones and tablets. That’s the way the scientists from the Poznań Supercomputing and Networking Center thought it out, and I have to honestly say, that they thought it out well. The entire learning process is entwined with a game and lots of fun. It really engages children, and they don’t even notice that they are learning. On the story level, the child has to help Scottie the robot, to repair his ship and go back home. On following levels, Scottie has to collect missing parts and avoid obstacles. But he can only do so if we show him a sequence of actions to perform. Here the key element of programming comes into play. Because you see, coding starts with logical thinking and creating an algorithm. Programming language and thousands of lines of code – that comes later. First the algorithm.

By using the puzzle pieces, which there are nearly 200 in the box, one creates a sequence of actions. At first these are simple algorithms, like this:

1. run
2. step forward
3. turn to the left
4. pick up
5. end

But with the following stages, functions, loops, and individual sequences appear. For laics this may sound terrifying, but the difficulty level rises reasonably and each level introduces new skills, so we learn in stages.

Scottie Go! Is – in my opinion – a great way to spend time with children. We can solve the puzzles together (at the same time learning ourselves). We face challenges, we can solve some puzzles, and the results are visible because the robot collects succeeding parts for his spaceship. I have played with mi kids and we had a lot of fun. The kids also played by themselves, and had fun. The game is for kids, let’s say 10 years old and more, but with the parents’ support even younger ones can manage. I played with Hania which can’t even read yet. Although, she can think and that’s enough.

The problem with coding is that it has been labeled as a male activity, which is absolutely not true. Unfortunately, many people fix this belief, which I – as a father of a daughter – heavily regret. Scottie Go! May constitute a very nice beginning of an adventure with coding for girls. Actually, look at their film.

Anyway, the kids and I, we strongly recommend it.

Best wishes,
Zuch

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