MAMA.codes

give kids the building blocks and key skills, add some story prompts and leave them to create wonderful things, and learn as they build and play. We believe coding shouldn’t just be associated with maths whizzes or geeks - and it shouldn’t be a male preserve either! Anyone can and should code - most future careers will have an element of coding - and in fact women dominated software engineering until the 1980s. As coding is essentially another language skill, the earlier kids get started, the easier they’ll find it to learn. Coding is now on the national curriculum from age 5, yet few parents and teachers feel confident in engaging children in this new area. Most parents know how to help their children learn to read, write and count, but coding is a new and daunting prospect for many. We are here to demystify coding for mums who lack information and confidence in this area, and provide a stream of fun AND educational coding projects to support their child’s learning at home. We will inspire and support mums to get coding with children as young as 3 - and crucially, keep coding to practice and develop their skills, as part of a range of healthy activities. Parents already provide a huge amount of support to school age children as they learn to read and start to receive homework. In the same way, children will need to practice new coding skills at home to develop a love of coding and really excel. One key difference in our approach is that we don’t see coding as a virtual activity, divorced from real-world activities and relationships. Our projects include nursery rhyme songs, nature, history, storytelling and drawing. We hope this will help overcome the increasing anxiety and guilt among parents over screen time and online safety. We have based our courses and projects on the teachings of Montessori and Piaget, and believe that young children learn through repetition, and progressive tasks. Our projects start simple, then re-use characters for more complex plots, etc. The first language we recommend for beginners is ScratchJr, which is a free iPad and Android tablet download developed by MIT and the lifelong kindergarten project at TUFTS. We are entirely independent of them and they are supportive of our activity. Co-founded by Alice Thompson, Luci McQuitty Hindmarsh and Liane Katz.