On one side of the room, children are building worlds and on the other, websites. A boy taps away at his keyboard, typing commands and tying up loose ends. He appears in his element, even if the name of the language he is using – Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) – would be enough to put most people off.
“I’m making a ninja profile page,” says Eissa Al Mulla, a nine-year-old Emirati, pointing to a screenful of text commands. He switches over to a preview of the web page and, like magic, it all makes sense.
“I have to insert a picture and then write something about him, and then his interests, jobs and where he’s lived,” says Eissa.
The ninja, according to the webpage, is 23. “He likes backflips, teriyaki steak and lurking in the darkness. His jobs are protecting the city, defending against enemies and chopping fruit with his sword. He’s lived in Shanghai, Beijing and Tokyo,” reads Eissa.
The page is basic – a white background, one image and text of varying sizes and formatting – but Eissa has built it entirely using code.
“It’s quite simple; it’s not that hard really. I’m just using indents to make it more organised.”
Eissa is on just his second day at the Coding Circle, an educational start-up based at Impact Hub Dubai. The web development course, which teaches HTML, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and JavaScript, is taught mainly by Sajjad Kamal, 26.
“I’ve been working in technology for a very long time. I started developing when I was 11 years old,” he says. Mr Kamal, who used to work for Apple and BlackBerry, now runs his own tech company but says he had little support when learning coding as a child.
“Teaching yourself really requires a lot of discipline – hours of work. But when somebody gets stuck, we’ll be there to help them out, and just that extra push really allows you to learn coding in a faster way.
“What we’re teaching them today is not a slimmed-down or trimmed-down version – it really is stuff that’s being used to build cool websites. And we actually make them go through the real process.”
From a technological point of view, he says, the way the world has changed in the past decade has “radically changed the way we live”.
“Today, if you show a kid a floppy disk, they’re going to go: ‘What is this thing?’” he says.
“And this is only going to accelerate. I don’t know what the timeline is going to be for self-driving cars, but 10 years from now, kids are probably going to be like, ‘You used to drive? That’s so old school’.”
The language of this change, he says, is technology. “And if you don’t know the language, you’re not going to be a part of the growth.”
Mr Kamal says the Coding Circle is filling that gap, with courses developed by programmers who have run companies and built products themselves.
On the other side of the class, children with more advanced skills are learning how to modify the popular game Minecraft using JavaScript.
Hamaad Mashkoor, 12, is struggling because his JavaScript keeps crashing. But he fixes it.
“We’re using CanaryMod and ScriptCraft to place JavaScript into a Minecraft theme. So, we’re basically making a world and modifying it through that,” says Hamaad.
His avatar gets stuck in a pile of blocks, but breaks his way out.
His instructor, Farris Massoudi, a programmer and entrepreneur, explains that his students are expected to learn JavaScript, also at the Coding Circle, before they start this course.
“They have more of a complete understanding of what they’re working with, and the understanding that you can take JavaScript, apply it to a website, and then take that same coding and language and actually apply it to other applications, in this case Minecraft,” he says.
Mr Massoudi asks Eisa Al Gurg, 11, to explain some of the different applications of JavaScript he has learnt.
Eisa says: “You can create a kind of game – I created a rock, paper, scissors game.”
He points to the text-filled screen. “This is the complete code, its actually very simple.”
It looks anything but.
“First of all, the computer needs to prompt you to answer if you want rock, paper or scissors – this is called user choice. Then, it has to make a random choice, based on three different numbers.”
The random choice is calculated between 0 and 1, and each third represents rock, paper and scissors respectively.
“In the end, it has to compare these two. But to compare that, it has to know what to compare it to – so if the user chose rock and the computer chose scissors, it has to return that the rock wins.”
Eisa has also created an address book, a game called Dragonslayer and a back-end cash machine application. He demonstrates how it works and, when the final bill pops up, receives a quiet high five from Hamaad.
Mr Massoudi explains how these skills can be applied to Minecraft.
“What they’ll be learning very soon is how to automate building processes in the Minecraft game. For example, if you want to build a skyscraper, you could create some code that says, ‘create one layer glass, one layer concrete, three layers glass’ – repeat 100 times – and it will build 100 floors of this building,” he says.
The speed at which children can absorb such skills is “incredible”, says Mr Massoudi. Children are, however, limited when it comes to independent initiatives or following instructions.
“There is an ocean of knowledge on the internet that you can teach yourself. However, the reality is that without a mentor, without a guide, it becomes very difficult for anybody, let alone children.” The Middle East, particularly, lacks good coding practices, he says.
“But, I think teaching the youth can have a profound effect on the entire emerging market region.”
Programming, he contends, will soon become as integrated as mathematics.
“The programming world requires so many different types of people: from creative artists doing user interfaces and front-end, to extremely mathematical and logic-orientated people doing the back-end. Encouragement and just knowing that somebody else is succeeding doesn’t create some sort of envy within the child. It makes them want to continue.”
In the real world, when developing applications, team coding and working in a community is critical.
“Traditionally, people think of programmers as being very antisocial and not very outgoing, but actually social skills are so critical to having a really solid programming team, and I think that’s why you see all these big companies, like Facebook, having all these really incredible office spaces,” says Mr Massoudi.
A child in the class asks another for help. The boy goes over and slowly guides his classmate.
“This behaviour right here is when I feel like I’m doing a good job,” says Mr Massoudi. He studied at Harvard, before starting up a series of businesses, including a few with his Coding Circle partners.
The 32-hour children’s course consists of eight four-hour sessions, held over two weeks, but the company hopes to start instructing in schools this year.
There are also advanced courses in the works for students older than 16, lasting up to 240 hours. Courses will extend into iOS and smartphone app development.
The Coding Circle began as an experiment last summer, when co-founder Ali Asghar, who worked at the investment bank Lazard, was unable to travel back to the United States for the summer. He wanted his children to spend their time productively and, with former Intel employee and co-founder Feroz Sanaulla, put on classes for 14 children from the American School of Dubai. The company launched its inaugural class in April.
“There are many outfits that will do a robotics workshop or a printing workshop but they are workshops; these are activities,” says Mr Sanaulla.
Now the company has investment, operates in the UAE and Jordan, and has partnerships with Google, Facebook, Cisco and Uber. Mr Asghar hopes that, like medical tourism, the UAE will be able to develop an education tourism industry.
“There is a demand that is not being satisfied, so people end up going to Eastern Europe; they go to India, Pakistan, etcetera. We met a guy a couple of weeks ago who has gone to London to do a three-month boot camp and he’s paying £10,000 [Dh56,860] for it.
“Everybody likes to come to Dubai, so if you want to come for a three-month period, then it makes sense – it’s like going for a college degree.”
The company has a class in Jordan that already has 19 paid-up students.
“Dubai is a bit of a transient place, but Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt and Saudi Arabia – that’s where the real population is. So, if you can establish a good coding programme over there, it will get a lot of ‘stickiness’.”
halbustani@thenational.ae
