BBC Connected Studio – Coding for Teenagers

On Tuesday 17th June we were invited to take part in a BBC initiative called Connected Studio.  This is a BBC initiative for collaborative innovation with some of the best of the UK’s online creatives.  Over the last few years they have run a set of events on a variety of topics including Weather & Travel, The Commonwealth Games and The Natural History Unit, each aiming to develop innovative ideas for digital media output with the resources, experience and power of the BBC behind them.

The event we were invited to take part in was Coding for Teenagers, a day long brainstorming and briefing event taking place across three sites in Salford, Cardiff and Glasgow. The challenge was to “Inspire your people to realise their creative potential through technology”. The UK is currently facing a severe skills shortage in the technology sector and the goal of the day was to come up with ways to encourage and inspire 13-16 year olds to get more involved with technology, in a creative way rather than just as end users, the brief was 

“to create an appealing digital experience with a coding component for teenagers aged 13-16.”

Needless to say we were excited to be invited to take part in such a  fun event with such an important goal, and so in line with the ideas and message behind LiveCode. So on one of the warmest, sunniest mornings of the year Kevin, Ben, Neil and I headed across to Glasgow ready sit inside watching presentations in the dark and coming up with some ideas.

The day started off with an introduction and live link up between the three sites. This was followed by an ideas board and team forming, and some presentations on the research that has been done in this area to help inspire us and point us in the right direction when coming up with ideas.

A lot of the issues that inspired this event are of interest to me. As a female developer I’m in the minority and I think that its important to help teenagers, and in particular girls, realise how varied and creative the work can be. 

The briefing document we were provided with specifically mentioned some of these points.

The Audience

Your challenge is to make sure we inspire not just teenagers in general, but teenage girls aged 13-16 in particular. That’s because only 

18% of computing professionals are women (E-Skills, 2012) and the number of female computer science graduates is down 13% (HESA, 

2013). A study for Nesta (TNS, 2014) suggests girls are less likely to make things using digital technology. They are also twice as unlikely to 

learn about it outside of school. 

Ideally, we’re looking for ideas that appeal to both boys and girls, however, we’re particularly keen to see ideas that appeal to girls. It’s 

always difficult to generalise but here are some insights that could help you understand our audience: 

Constantly connected 

Teenagers stay in constant contact. Unsurprisingly, mobile phones are more important to them than any other device, even TV. Girls are 

particularly prolific communicators; in 2012, 12-15 year old girls sent 35% more texts than boys (Ofcom, 2012). 

Visual self-expression 

Teenagers can be highly visual, and use photography and video to express feelings, forge friendships and share their lives (Boyd, 2014). 

Examples include the appeal of emojis to express emotion; Vine to easily edit and share video and Snapchat or Instagram to share photos. 

Developing identities 

Teenagers become increasingly conscious of shaping the way they present themselves to others (Sherbert research for BBC, 2013). Social 

media now plays a key role in how they maintain and develop their identity (Doster, 2013). For example, the photos that they stage, share 

and comment on help them express not only who they are but also how they want to be seen. Some also use social media to connect with 

cultural icons and earn kudos from their peers. 

The full document can be found at

http://www.bbc.co.uk/partnersandsuppliers/connectedstudio/events/coding.html

 Our idea

We wanted to come up with an idea that would somehow combine the things that teenagers enjoy using in technology while also inspire an interest in the creation of technology. 

We came up with an app that would allow users to create a photo story or small comic using their own pictures, videos and sounds and adding speech bubble, text, graphics, transitions etc. These stories could then be passed on and added to by their friends.

The coding element would come in because the feature set would initially be full but basic. The stories would be created using a drag and drop interface which also output real, readable and editable code allowing the user to extend the features of the app to acheive the effect they want.

For example initially we might provide 3 text colours for speech bubbles black, white and red, but if you really wanted green text you could go into the code editor and add this option. The initial code would be well commented and simple enough that this basic type of extension would be easy to accomplished by copying and pasting an existing line and just change the relative part of the line, ideally getting people coding without even realised that that is what they are doing. The hope is that this would lead to the users adding more complex features to their stories.

Another element of this that we hoped would encourage the use of code would be to see a story one of your friends had made with a really nice feature in it that your version doesn’t have. If you want that feature you either have to add it in yourself or ask your friend to share it with you. This sharing of features would itself expand the users understanding of coding and the creative possibilities.

Audience Feedback

In the afternoon we had the chance to put our idea forward to a panel of genuine young people, luckily they liked the idea and gave us plenty to think about, both for our pitch later and for things to think about if our idea gets taken forward. This included thinking about how ownership of a story would work and pass on through each page, and the variety of ways it could be used, including as a story board or inspiration board for sharing ideas for a theatre production.

The pitches

At the end of the day each team, 36 in all, did a 2 minute pitch of their ideas. It was interesting to see how many teams had independently come up with similar ideas and the range of ideas that were put forward.

Some of the ideas that were pitched included

– a secret message that is sent to you by a friend,  you have to change the code to uncover the message

– a dream house creating tool

– a Hackstage Pass where you unlock content and experiences from musicians by completing coding tasks and challenges,  presented by a team including CoderDojoScotland @CoderScot

– using magic tricks to teach coding concepts

The next stage

Following the Creative Studio 10 teams are invited to the Build Studio, a 2 day event where the selected ideas are developed further and refined. If we are selected I’m sure you’ll be looking forward to another blog post on that event.