Aardman Animations aims to get kids coding with Shaun the Sheep contest

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/15/aardman-kids-coding-shaun-the-sheep

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The creator of Wallace and Gromit and Shaun the Sheep is encouraging British children to learn to code, with a game-making contest backed by Nominet Trust.

Shaun's Game Academy, which launched this morning, gets children to make games based on Shaun the Sheep using programming platform Scratch.

Aardman has developed five educational modules teaching children how to use Scratch, and is offering prizes for the best games created in two categories: children aged 12 and under, and aged 13 and over.

The competition runs until September, when basic programming will become part of the UK's information and communications technology (ICT) curriculum. Aardman will provide resources for parents and teachers as part of its contest, while parenting website Mumsnet is also on board as a partner.

"Children are eager to make their own projects online, but many don’t have the opportunity to do so," said Nominet Trust chief executive Annika Small. " Combining digital making with young people’s everyday interests is a great way to create digital activities that are relevant and fun."

Speaking to The Guardian, Aardman's creative director for the project, Ricky Martin, said that Shaun's Game Academy was inspired partly by the success of the Tate Movie Project – a collaborative movie-making project for 5-13 year-olds run by Tate and Aardman in 2010-11.

"Whenever we make a game for children, we do a lot of user testing with kids giving us feedback, and their ideas are always completely crazy, so we've often thought about putting them all into one game made by kids," said Martin.

"We were so impressed by the response to the Tate Movie Project, we thought that if we actually put video game creation into the hands of kids, it would be amazing."

Martin said that Scratch was the logical platform to use for the competition. Developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab, it has become one of the most popular online resources for children learning to code, whether at home or at school.

"The great thing about Scratch is that there's a really big community behind them now, and every project is remixable: once a child has put a game out, other kids can look under the bonnet and see how it works," said Martin.

"We've tailored the training modules to making platform games, but for the contest children can make anything they want: they can remix our games, make their own ideas and even put their own characters in."

Martin added that if the contest goes well, it could be the spur for more ambitious projects from Aardman based on children and coding in the future.

"There is a glimmer here at Aardman that one day we could like to do a game where the actual story is created by kids, the characters are created by kids, and the coding is done by kids," he said. "How Shaun's Game Academy pans out will influence whether that would be viable."

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