FluteBot - Programming with Music!

Technology is taking over the world! Well, maybe not. But our society is getting digitalized and our children need to get prepared for the inevitable future. A world full of technology!

The Swedish government has now added programming lessons as a part of our public school curricula – including our kindergartens. This means children are exposed to more than 10 years of programming before even reaching high school. Great! That means we will have super programmers in 10-20 years! We sure need more programmers today, and we will need more in the future! ...but wait a second. Should we teach programming in public schools to prepare all children to become programmers? Should we teach math in school to prepare all children to become mathematicians? Or teach chemistry to prepare children to become chemists? Doesn’t sound right to me. Just like chemistry is taught because we live in a world with chemical interactions, we should teach programming because we live in a world full of technology.

In my masters-thesis, A Digital App for Early Programming, I researched the possibilities to develop a tool to introduce programming for young children in kindergarten. The result was FluteBot – a tablet game where children help sheep to reach the delicious grass by using programming concepts!