When Bitsbox co-founder Scott Lininger learned to code, it was on a TRS-80 color computer his mom and dad bought him when he was a kid. He says he taught himself coding by copying from the book that came with the computer. Now a dad himself, Lininger wanted to offer his daughter the opportunity to experience learning to code much in the same way he did, but couldn’t find a service that he felt focused on the part of learning that’s really necessary: the part where you practice actually typing code.
“Most of the [learn-to-code products for kids] are fantastic,” says Lininger, who left his job at Google around six months ago, where he previously worked as a senior software engineer within its SketchUp division after selling his startup to the company back in 2007.
“All the drag-and-drop tools, they teach you the grammar, the syntax, and the structure of language,” Lininger explains. “If you’re going to be able to write something in German, you’re going to have to understand the rules of German. But then there’s just the fluency part of it…the second part is just practicing the actual coding.”
When he began looking around for recommendations and ideas for teaching coding to his daughter, his Google colleagues all told him they learned much in the same way he did – they typed out code. “None of us over the age of 30 or so learned to code by dragging blocks around,” notes Lininger. “Having kids type code works.”
The challenge, however, is making kids think that typing code is fun. That’s where Bitsbox comes in.
“The enemy is not hard, it’s boring. Kids will do hard stuff, but if it’s boring, you’ve lost them,” says Lininger.
The site, which has been live for just three weeks has already seen 70,000 users sign up and code via the web, spending 280,000 minutes doing so, which equates to 194 days of coding.
Much of that traffic has come from Code.org, where Bitsbox has been listed as a featured activity. Online, kids get a virtual tablet and are able to build simple apps and games in JavaScript.
Lininger says the lightweight programming API Bitsbox uses is like the “Dick and Jane” version of coding, referencing the classic books for young readers which used very short, easy-to-spell words that repeated often.