Prof. Ken Kahn highlights importance of coding culture for youngsters

Create Lab’s Academic Board Member, Prof. Ken Kahn from Oxford, was in Colombo recently, conducting a special Computational Thinking, artificial intelligence and technology enhanced learning, for Create Lab’s students.

ToonTalk was designed and built by Prof. Ken Kahn who, after earning a doctorate in computer science from MIT, spent over 30 years as a researcher in programming languages, computer animation, and programming systems for children. He has been a faculty member at MIT, University of Stockholm, and Uppsala University. For over eight years he was a researcher at Xerox PARC. He has made several animated films that have been shown in film festivals, theatres, and cable TV. In 1992, Ken founded Animated Programs whose mission is to make computer programming child’s play. He received a patent covering the underlying technology of ToonTalk.

Having recently participated in several international research projects (Playground, WebLabs, and the BBC Digital Curriculum Project), he is currently contributing to the European ReMath project and is leading the Constructing 2 Learn and Modelling 4 All projects at the University of Oxford.

In Colombo at his recent visit, he noted that apart from companies in the technology sector, there are an increasing number of businesses relying on computer code and as a result, coding has become a core skill that bolsters a candidate’s chances of commanding a high salary. Computer activities are all too often employed in preschool (and kindergarten) activity rooms with little regard for what is going on beyond, he says, noting that Create Lab’s Program is designed especially for students with no prior experience in coding to develop an interest in technology and gain valuable 21st century skills that schools don’t teach. 

Why is it so vital that we teach our children to code? We are already living in a world dominated by software. Software is becoming a critical layer of all our lives. It is the language of our world. In the future, not knowing the language of computers will be as challenging as being illiterate or innumerate are today.

In this context, Create Lab’s classes are designed to appeal to girls as well as boys through an age-appropriate curriculum written with academics from Oxford, MIT and Singapore’s top universities. “Students will build a solid foundation in computational thinking and acquire skills to become innovators. At the end of the program, students will be able to independently build their own computer games, digital stories and learning tools,” the Professor added.

An important set of activities that Create Lab does, he explained, was that of world-knowledge activities, which aim to draw the child’s attention to particular features of the world, such as the names employed to identify colours, the distinction between geometrical shapes, the composite parts of an animal, the features of each season, the origin of each kind of food, etc.

At an ensuing discussion with principals and decision makers at leading schools in Colombo, he noted that Sri Lanka’s children’s perception thinking is on par with that of the West. “As an example, most of the 16 to 17 year olds in Indonesia aren’t as good as the 10-12 year olds here.”

He said that AI is becoming more important in professional programming. “Computational thinking teaches you how to tackle large problems by breaking them down into a sequence of smaller, more manageable problems. It allows you to tackle complex problems in efficient ways that operate at huge scale. It involves creating models of the real world with a suitable level of abstraction, and focus on the most pertinent aspects. It helps you go from specific solutions to general ones.”

He noted that Create Lab’s children were quite interested and were keen to learn newer things.