Theo Holroyd and Ollie Gerety share a common passion – they both love programming.
But until recently it was difficult for the two students at King's College School, Cambridge, to work together to implement a project.
Theo is blind, and the method the school uses to introduce children to simple programming concepts simply didn't work for him.
Microsoft has developed a natural programming language to help those with vision impairments.
Code Jumper consists of a series of pods, each of which contains a single line of code, representing a set of commands.
They can be linked in different sequences to create a program – and Theo and Ollie have helped to test and improve the system.
The woman leading the project is Cecily Morrison, a computer scientist at Microsoft's Cambridge research laboratory.
She had a personal reason that made her think about the problem of teaching programming to visually impaired children – her son was born blind six years ago.
“We wanted to understand his world,” he explains, “and we quickly realized that many of his older friends wanted to be taught programming but there were no options available for them to learn it at that young age.”.
She and her colleagues at Microsoft quickly decided that children needed something physical – “something they could hold in their hands and that would give them meaning in their world.”
Music is also part of the project – the pods can be programmed to play a specific note and young programmers can put them in different sequences.
“There are buttons on the pods that can change the sound or duration of the commands they have in their program,” explains Ms. Morrison.
As with Scratch (the program used primarily in elementary schools), this project is a basic introduction to programming concepts, and children can then move on to other more advanced coding languages.
It worked for Theo.
“Whereas before I couldn't get into programming, using pods I was able to understand all these concepts and then be able to move on,” he says.
Theo now wants to pursue this professionally and describes his plan to make phones and computers more accessible to blind people.
After four years of development, Code Jumper is now set to be sold to schools in the UK, US, Canada, Australia and India, with plans to roll out globally within the next five years.
Cecily Morrison hopes that the pods will be used by all children: “We don’t want to take blind children out of their regular lessons, but to give them a tool that all the children in their class – including them – can use so they can engage in programming alongside their peers who don’t have vision problems.”.
