Tacoma sixth graders develop ‘Generation Code’ game at Seattle Startup Weekend

The foundation of education has always been reading, writing and arithmetic but these days you can add coding to that.

Tacoma’s Semira Lacet-Brown and Fiona Brennan are enthusiastic participants.

“Because right now we have a lack of coders, there are $1 million unfilled coding jobs and it’s very important to get more of them. If we teach kids how to code at a younger age, there will be more coders and they will have more opportunities when they’re older,” said Lacet-Brown.

Lacet-Brown and Brennan are in 6th grade.

“Computer coding is really helpful and computer coding is the future, getting jobs and coding would be really important because we have jobs opening up and not enough people to fill them and we need more computer science teachers,” said Brennan.

Coding is catching on at the grade school level. Websites like Code.org are pushing the curriculum by sponsoring school districts – including about a dozen in our state – to teach it in the upcoming school year.

Lacet-Brown and Brennan attend Seabury Middle School, a private school for gifted children in Tacoma. You don’t have to be gifted to learn coding, but the two girls took their love for coding further and started their own program.

They developed a coding game to teach other kids the trade.

“Coding is the basic way to give instructions to a computer. I think that’s the simplest way to put it: It gives instructions to the computer and you tell it what to do and then it replies. It’s practically a robot,” said Lacet-Brown.

They created their coding program at Seattle Startup Weekend at the University of Washington.

During the weekend, they were shadowed by adult computer industry insiders and in a weekend designed and developed a coding came called “Generation Code.” Lacet-Brown said it’s to target kids who aren’t connecting with the current coding websites.

“What our idea is, is like a project that vies you something in between Scratch and CodeAcademy. It’s an interactive game that isn’t just coding,”explained Lacet-Brown.

In the coding game they developed, a professor shows up to teach users a lesson in coding. Along the way, the student might encounter a “code monster” and will have to show they understood the lesson in order to defeat the monster.

It targets kids age 9 to 12, but they also hope it will inspire more girls to learn how to code.

“I don’t know if our game will necessarily change the balance between boys and girls coding,” said Lacet-Brown. “I think the fact that there were two girls founding it might help, definitely might be something there.”