Charlotte kids learn to code in library program

Students in the Charlotte coding club taught by Christina Asquith at the Charlotte Library.

Photo by Abigail Carroll

Declan Pagnucco loves playing Fortnite and he’s taking his passion for the popular video game to the next level.

The Charlotte Central School seventh grader is learning how to create his own game based on the battle-royale phenomenon with the Charlotte Coding Club.

Every Wednesday, the Charlotte Library fills with kids like Pagnucco who’ve joined the club to learn the magic behind their favorite video games and more. The group is for students grades six through 12 who want to learn how to code.

The group was started in March by Christina Asquith, co-founder and chief operating officer of Hack Club, a Shelburne-based nonprofit that supports student-run high school coding clubs.

“Coding is like a superpower,” Asquith said. “It’s a really fun way to build cool stuff with your friends, and everyone should try it.”

On a recent Wednesday, around 15 students in the club were in the middle of a six-week program that would lead them to create their own games. The current program runs until Oct. 26, but Asquith plans to run another one in 2023.

The kids have been learning different coding languages and using a program called Sprig, a game engine and web-based editor that lets people code retro-style games. The system was created by Hack Club, and kids who submit their game designs can receive a device to play them on.

Asquith originally started the club with a plan to teach kids about web design. But she soon found the kids were more interested in video games and the club switched focus. She decided they should learn JavaScript, a coding language used for making interactive content like animated graphics, interactive maps, pop-ups and anything else that moves across a screen. It’s the coding language Sprig works with and is perfect for creating the kind of relatively simple games kids can build.

Asquith said she wanted to combine the technical side of coding with the creativity of video games to help the students get excited about their work.

Charlotte Central School seventh-grader Odie Kallock, one of the club members at the library on a recent Wednesday, had already completed one session of the program. For Kallock, figuring out the code and the challenge of getting it to work is exciting, and seeing what he can create is fun.

As Asquith said: “I don’t want coding to seem like a dry, irrelevant and disconnected theoretical concept. I want within the first class for them to see the results of what they’ve built.”

Kids can join the program without any experience and start learning code and designing games from their first meeting.

The students like how they’re able to pursue projects based on things they enjoy. “It’s fun because you get to create things you want to create,” Charlotte Central School sixth-grader Asher Davidson said. He hopes to make a game about sports, especially basketball.

Coding can be challenging, too. But the kids have been up to the task, and Asquith is there to help. During the recent meeting the students faced a few hurdles: making a block move or change a color on their computers. As they worked away for more than an hour Asquith answered many tough questions, and kids who solved one problem got up to eagerly help others.

“They have begun to shift their mentality and their mindset from just being consumers of video games, to creators of video games,” Asquith said.

View the original story on The Citizen.