Knight Foundation supports The Lab Miami and Hopscotch to promote civic engagement and entrepreneurship. Below, Derek Merleaux, digital asset manager at the Wolfsonian-Florida International University, writes about a recent hands-on coding workshop for kids funded by Knight and hosted by the Wolfsonian and The LAB Miami.

Ten-year-old Ezra intently watched the cartoon gorilla romping around his iPad.

He tilted his tablet to make the animal move and tapped the screen to change the color of a line that traced its path.

“I really liked how it lets you do things with the iPad, like react to sound or to the tilting or moving of the iPad,” he said.  He shook his iPad to show how the lines could be erased.

He wasn’t just playing. He had built “Gorilla Sketch” himself, using Hopscotch, a free app designed to help kids learn how to code.

The South Miami resident was one of about 30 children who gathered with their parents on a recent Saturday in July for a coding workshop presented by the Wolfsonian-FIU and The Lab Miami at the Lab’s  Wynwood campus. The eager participants ranged from 8 to about 12 years old.

Focused on young users, Hopscotch uses fun characters to make animations, games and interactive toys. The creators of Hopscotch, Jocelyn Leavitt and Samantha John, led the way at the workshop, which was preceded by a talk on the software the previous night. “With Hopscotch, kids can create software scripts and build projects with zero typing,” Leavitt said. “It’s like Legos for software: part tool, part toy, part learning experience.” 

Hopscotch riffs off the groundbreaking visual programming environment called Scratch, which was created by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab. It simplifies coding by using visual building blocks that can be dragged around the screen in place of lengthy lines of obtuse scripts, math and finicky punctuation. Hopscotch enables kids to focus on logic, the foundation for coding and computing, reducing the amount of frustrating errors often produced by misplaced semicolons. While they’re creating, they can click on the “play” button at any time to see the results of their work. Hopscotch empowers the participant to engage both logic and problem solving.

In the first hour, the kids at the workshop were shown the basics of the drag-and-drop coding app by doing seemingly simple drawing exercises. One kid remarked, “Coding a program to draw the square is much harder than just swiping my finger across the screen.” They were then challenged to make a 21^st century version of the classic Etch A Sketch, the popular drawing toy invented in 1960. By the end of the two-hour workshop, the kids had not only created their own digital interpretations of the vintage toy, but had created many more original, fully functional interactive animations and games.

 That’s the essence of Hopscotch’s mission: enabling kids to explore code, empowering them with tools to realize their ideas and inspiring them to continually develop their programming interests.

According to Matt Haggman, Knight’s Miami program director, the foundation funded Hopscotch as part of an effort to strengthen Miami’s emerging startup community. “We’re thinking long term,” he said. “We want to broaden and diversify our tech community through targeted educational efforts like coding workshops for children. Programs like Hopscotch teach kids to think in new ways, preparing them to be our next generation of entrepreneurs.”

Derek Merleaux, digital asset manager