NPR – Anya Kamenetz
“Back when Grant Hosford’s older daughter was in first grade, she signed up for an extracurricular class, building robots with a programmable Lego toy called Mindstorms. Hosford, a dot-com entrepreneur, came to visit the class and was startled to see that Naomi, who loves science and math, was both the only girl there and the youngest by a couple of years. “My first reaction was not, ‘Oh, I’m going to go build a coding company.’ My first reaction was, ‘What can I build for my daughter that will help her down this path?’ Hosford did go on to be a co-founder of a company called codeSpark. Its gamelike software, The Foos, teaches basic computer programming skills — “the ABCs of coding”— with no reading necessary. It’s aimed at children as young as 5, and it has been downloaded 700,000 times so far in 150 countries.”(more)