Coding is a link to the outside world for Australian Boy with Autism
It’s increasingly clear that learning to code at school is as important as maths and English, but it’s not just a skill for city kids.
Code Club Australia, a network that aims to give free after-school coding lessons to children aged from nine to 11, is helping kids with all types of abilities in all types of locations learn to code.
It hosts plenty of urban clubs, with 96 clubs in Sydney, 43 in Brisbane and 57 in Melbourne, but also one in the tiny town of Booborowie in a rural corner of South Australia. In this tiny agricultural town, coding has helped a young boy with autism develop his creativity as well find new interest in his studies.
It may be held at a school with only around 20 students, but Booborowie’s Code Club proves the power of programming to offer a new path for children who really need it.
The club is run by Charlotte Burmester, originally from Bath in the UK, who arrived in Australia as a backpacker. Working on a farm in Jamestown, South Australia, she met her partner and decided to stick around, she told Mashable Australia in late 2015. Looking for something to do, she decided to put her university degree in IT to good use. She began working in local schools, including Booborowie, in February, 2015.
Working with Jacob
Burmester does not run a conventional Code Club. The initiative began when the school’s principal employed Burmester to work with one year seven boy, Jacob Wedding, who has high-functioning autism. “She wanted me to work with him to get him engaged more in schooling,” she said. “He was bored, really, and didn’t want to do any work.”
As it turned out, Wedding was really, really into computers. Using the basic programming language Scratch, she started Wedding out on worksheets, but he tore through them quickly and loved it. “He went home and started building his own games,” she said. “It was beyond my expectations.”
Wedding even made a game in Scratch to show off at school assembly, which, amazingly, he had also translated into Japanese. “The parents absolutely loved it, because he had gone away and done it all on his own. He didn’t ask me a single question about it,” she said. “He got a massive round of applause, and lots of laughs.”
Burmester is particularly thrilled coding has allowed Wedding to express himself. “While he struggles in other areas, this gives him something that is his, that he can own. It’s a sense of control,” she explained. “He never thought he could say, ‘I’m really good at maths,’ ‘I’m really good at English.’ But now he can say ‘I’m really good at Scratch, and here’s what I can make’.”
Laura Wedding, Wedding’s mother, shares Burmester’s excitement. “Jacob has learnt a lot through programming and I believe it has been worthwhile and a good learning experience for him,” she wrote in an email to Mashable Australia. “[It] has given him confidence.”
Expanding horizons
Burmester had been working with Wedding once a week, but his classmates were always looking over his shoulder and pleading to join in, she said. She’s now started working on Scratch with a number of other Booborowie students, and even pulled together the funds to buy some small Edison robot kits for them to program and play with.
For kids in Booborowie, Code Club could be a chance to introduce them to an entirely new skill set, Burmester said. “When they were taught IT as a subject before, it was literally just using Excel, Word and Powerpoint,” she explained. “It’s not just the actual coding they’re learning, it’s logical thinking. They’re learning logical steps to solve problems, which you can use in everyday life.”
She hopes to get all the kids involved, and then expand to other rural schools in the state. “I think people in small towns really struggle to open their eyes to the possibilities of what careers are out there,” she said.
“I’d like to open their eyes a bit more to the world of STEM careers … for them to find out about about different careers available to them outside the trade and agriculture they see around their own town.”