Kid coding is already a thing in India

Schoolchildren learning coding and building their own bots with the help of Artificial Intelligence that actually help in school activities? Karan Bajaj, Founder and CEO of WhiteHat Jr., talks about the importance of teaching coding to kids.

How important is it to teach coding to children at a young age? Do they pick up easily and how does it benefit them?

We are born curious. When we are young, we are not clouded with judgements and other worries. At a young age, the power to grasp and understand any subject or activity is higher than at a later stage in our lives. Teaching kids to code provides a well-structured way to introduce them to rational thinking and problem-solving skills. It also helps kids to improve their logical and analytical thinking and increases creativity and concentration – all of which are skills that can be applied far beyond the realm of computer science. We know that not everyone is the same. Few kids pick up coding easily and enjoy it, while others do take time to gain proficiency. However, we have teachers who are specially trained in getting kids to not only learn but also enjoy the process of coding and due to this we’ve seen kids create some great apps on our platform.

Does coding help children with the rest of their education and other life skills?

When I was starting WhiteHat Jr., I read a fair bit of research on the subject from MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and Tufts University and I found that kids use the fundamentals of logic, sequence, structure and algorithmic thinking to create tech products like games, animations and apps. More crucially, at an early age they start viewing themselves as creators—makers of games versus players of games, creators of videos versus surfers of videos. This is a huge change in the mindset that affects their behavior and approach towards almost everything in life.

There have been examples of kids benefitting from coding classes not just regarding computer related applications but even beyond them. For example, Aditya Jha, one of our students is top 10 in his age group in the state in chess and his father believes that coding classes have improved his ability in chess. The trend we are seeing is coding skills triggers outperformance in complementary fields like math, chess, etc. besides overall improvement in creativity, logical and analytical thinking.

Is there any scope or demand for coding from children in rural areas?

WhiteHat Jr. has kids from across India between 6 to 14 years of age. We have students enrolling not only from the metro cities, but also from places like Balangir in Odisha. We’re also seeing great traction from Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities. We expect this trend to grow even further as there is greater education amongst parents about the benefits that learning coding can provide their children. Right now, the next step is building awareness about the value of coding for kids. This is already spreading as a viral phenomenon across the country. Once people are more aware, we’re expecting increased demand from across geographies.

Will coding at an early age help kids cope in the era of Artificial Intelligence-Machine Learning?

Our aim is to empower the next generation to be creators in the world of the future with the help of coding. The Future of Jobs Report by the World Economic Forum has predicted 65% of children entering primary school today will ultimately end up working in completely new job types that do not even exist yet. 65% of today’s jobs won’t exist 7 years from now. AI will impact 800 million jobs in 2020. Basically, any job that doesn’t involve creation will be automated.

We want to sensitize parents and kids about the immediate and long-term benefits of coding skills. It enables kids to learn logic, structure and algorithms to eventually prepare them for the future. Our specially developed curriculum also introduces kids to the basics of AI-ML in a manner that’s accessible to them.

What about Robotic Process Automation? It is said that just about anyone can make a bot. Do you teach children how to make them?

RPA is basically the use of bots and other AI-based automation to simplify complex processes. The foundation of this is the ability to build programs and apps capable of learning and simplifying processes. It’s not just about building the bot but more about the problem that such bot seeks to address. We’ve a very interesting example to share here. One of our students Shaurya Sharma from Bombay International School has built an AI enabled bot for schools. Shaurya learned to build chatbots in our course and he chose to apply this knowledge to help his school community of parents and teachers by developing an AI chatbot and training it on the information about his school. He meticulously followed the software development life cycle by curating data about the school through researching the school website and interviewing few teachers and then training the chatbot to answer most common questions asked by parents about the school. After clearing the beta testing the chatbot can answer about 200+ descriptive and quantitative questions about the school.

The chatbot once integrated to the school website will be accessible to thousands of parents visiting the school website each day and will serve as an AI assistant like Siri, Alexa, where parents can type or ask questions as the bot has a speech recognition feature as well. The bot will provide them with the answers they are looking for. This will save time and effort of the parent looking for information on the school for admission.

What is the status of smart education in India today? What already has been done to make our education system smart and what more is required?

The Indian higher education system is robust as is witnessed by our contribution to space research as well as the technology industry—not only in India but across the world. What it needs however is a more holistic approach to computer science at the primary school level. Kids today learn the basics of computing in schools but there needs to be a more comprehensive approach to teaching them coding as one of the key skills of the future. While schools are doing their bit in using technology to enable learning for students, we believe that there’s an opportunity for them to work with specialized players like us to focus on certain key areas.

Also, a key point here is that some of these skills need to be taught in a 1:1 format—something that is not possible for schools to do at a scale. We are connecting with various schools to explain the benefits of coding classes at an early age and sensitizing them on the gap in the current education system that we’re addressing. The response has been extremely encouraging and we’re looking to amplify our outreach to schools in the coming months.

What are the basic tools required to make education smart?

Some of the basic tools used to make education smart are computers, smartphones, tablets etc. These are augmented by apps, videos and virtual classrooms. The focus is on leveraging technology as a tool to enable learning in a faster and more interactive way. There’s also a need to design the course curriculum in such a way that it teaches skills and concepts that will be relevant in the digital age.

We also need to encourage schools to make kids creators. They are the main beneficiaries of the education system and, just like Shaurya, are best placed to creatively add to the existing education system. Smart, creative kids are the key source of making education smart.

Every child is an expert with the smartphone. Can smart education be worked around the smartphone, which has much greater accessibility and is more widespread than other tools?

Smart education can certainly be worked around smartphones. In fact, mobile learning is a big trend across the globe today and kids are using various learning-based apps to learn a variety of topics. However, the smartphone is a tool and it still needs to be used along with the help of teachers or parents to get maximum benefits and make sure that the learning is being administered in the right way—especially when it comes to kids.