Kids Code in a rural village in Norway: could code clubs be a new arena for increasing girls’ digital interest and competence?

ABSTRACT

A trend, where voluntary groups teach children and youth basic computer coding skills, has spread throughout the world. After-school clubs invite children to create games in visual programming environments. The activities emphasize play, while teaching principles of computer science. We explore this phenomenon based on observations and interviews at a code club in Norway, asking whether coding represents an important skill for children and how it is distributed to include all children. We find that coding through play activity is perceived as teaching more than simply the technical skills of programming. Although the fun aspect draws in children and volunteers, parents and instructors describe the code club as being about learning to understand and control the computer, and digital competence required for achieving success in society. The Code Club is described partly as being a ‘necessity for becoming a good/efficient/empowered citizen in our digital society’, and partly as ‘children are playing with computers anyway’. These arguments have different consequences for the gender imbalance at the Code Club. Our findings suggest that the code clubs need an explicit recruitment strategy targeting girls in order to become an arena where girls can develop interest and competence in digital technologies.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital competence
• children's coding
• code club
• programming
• Kids Code
• gender and technology
• inclusion

Acknowledgements

We want to thank children, parents, and volunteers at the Code Club, as well as teachers at the primary school contributing to this study. The first draft of this paper was presented at the conference Understanding Global Digital Culture by the World Universities Network in Hong Kong in 2015. We wish to thank those involved in discussing the paper at the conference. Finally, thank you to Fulbright Professor Radhika Gajjala and our colleagues at Western Norway Research Institute, Svein Ølnes and Idun A. Husabø for support, comments and proofreading.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Hilde G. Corneliussen is Associate Professor in Digital Culture at University of Bergen and Senior Researcher at Western Norway Research Institute. Corneliussen has a doctoral degree (2003) in Humanistic Informatics from University of Bergen. Her main research interests are in computer technology, gender identity and culture, and she has published on gender and ICT, computer history, computer education, and computer games, with titles like Gender-technology relations: Exploring stability and change (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) and the co-edited anthology Digital culture, play, and identity: A world of Warcraft® reader (MIT Press, 2008). [email: [email protected]]

Lin Prøitz Senior Researcher. Dr Lin Prøitz has a Ph.D. on the topic of mobile telephony practices among youths, in Gender and Media Science (2007) from University of Oslo. EU rewarded her research with a Marie Sklodowska Curie fellowship in 2015 to investigate young people's political photographies online. In addition to her academic career, Prøitz has been working in telecom as a Researcher in Telenor Research & Innovation; as a Senior Researcher at the Norwegian Institute of Children's Books; and as Senior Researcher at Western Norway Research Institute. Presently, she is a researcher at the University of Sheffield. [email: [email protected]]

Notes

1. Examples of this include http://girlswhocode.com/about-us/, http://www.blackgirlscode.com/, http://learninglabs.org/members/girls-learning-code/, http://techmums.co/.

2. http://www.kidsakoder.no/.

3. Eighty-seven per cent of children and youth between 9 and 15 and 95% of adolescents between 16 and 24 use the internet every day (Vaage, 2013).

4. http://ow.ly/Rxe63.

5. http://ow.ly/Rxebe.

6. http://csedweek.org/, http://code.org/, http://hourofcode.com/, June 2015.

7. http://www.kidsakoder.no/kodeklubben/, https://www.codeclub.org.uk/.

8. http://www.kidsakoder.no/faq/, 17 October 2014.

9. http://ow.ly/RxeC4, 17 October 2014.

10. https://scratch.mit.edu/.

11. https://minecraft.net/.

12. See for instance: http://www.lego.com/en-us/mindstorms/learn-to-program.

13. The focus of this article is on the voluntary after-school initiative, while a forthcoming article will report in depth from the Kids Code initiative's involvement at school.

14. Interview in USA Today. http://ow.ly/Rxepg.

Additional information

Funding

The work was funded by Regional Research Funds for Western Norway [grant number 248520]. Corneliussen's participation at the conference Understanding Global Digital Culture was funded through University of Bergen's membership in World Universities Network while Prøitz' participation was funded by Western Norway Research Institute.