“Miss! We made it breathe out fire!” exclaimed 10-year-old Joe, pointing at the laptop on his desk, where he has programmed his animated dragon to belch flames into the face of the Greek hero Heracles.

Gasps of excitement ripple across the classroom, as the children at Launcelot school in south London try to work out the string of commands that Joe used to create their own virtual battles.

This is no special class — it is a scene being recreated across England, which in September became the first major world economy to make coding a compulsory subject for children in publicly-funded schools from the age of five.

The government overhauled the computing curriculum after industry figures warned that children were not learning the skills they needed to compete in the 21st century.

And now these pupils are not just playing computer games, but learning how to make them.

Jemimah, a softly spoken 10-year-old in an immaculate blue and black uniform, smiles with satisfaction as she, too, manages to make her dragon breathe fire.

“At the first lesson I wasn’t really sure how to do it. I had to have lots of help but I’ve been really getting it now,” she says.

For many people, the word coding conjures up nightmarish images of lines and lines of text on a computer screen, written by hunched figures typing furiously.

But the students are using basic animation software that gives them a choice of command phrases — move forward or back, lift a shield — that can be arranged in sequence to make the brightly coloured characters come to life.

In another classroom, younger pupils are learning coding through an iPad programme called “Daisy the Dinosaur”

Source: Yahoo! News

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