Students in Finland play chess to learn coding skills.
Coding, the ability to read and write the language of computer software, is considered an important future skill, a fluency in the common langue of a connected, technological, global economy. In Finland, they are using chess, a game at least 1,300 years old, to teach it.
You may say, “who cares what they’re doing in Finland?” We should.
Finland is universally considered to have the best education system in the world, certainly top five depending on who you ask. It’s also home to companies such as Nokia and Supercell and xEdu, the largest edtech accelerator in Europe. So, we should probably care how they teach coding and technology in Finland.
We should also care because coding is about more than getting a good technology job. Learning how to code, education experts say, lays a foundation for important general thinking skills such as problem solving, sequencing, strategic thinking and iteration. Accordingly, coding is already a keystone in basic education worldwide, starting in the earliest classroom and program settings.
In Finland, as part of Helsinki Education Week, I had a chance to visit Roihuvuoren Ala-Aste, a primary school focused on tech skills, including coding. In conversations with teachers, the principal and a few students, it was easy to see how differently the Finns view coding education for young learners.
In the U.S., we tend to deliver early coding lessons digitally, through designed game play embedded with the lessons that underly coding. We think that kids want to play video games and the learning will tag along. So, in American schools, it’s common to see kids tapping away at tablets or notebooks, earning points and badges as they hopefully absorb the lessons of logic and problem solving.
At Roihuvuoren Ala-Aste, it was clear that teachers there viewed the lessons of coding as both deeply un-digital and spatial. There, the game playing with coding lessons was tactile, moving pieces around game actual boards. The kids connected and sequenced actual, touchable puzzle pieces. In the earliest grades, the kids played something called human robot in which two or three children would direct a fellow student, physical footstep by footstep, turn by turn, around the school building to retrieve an item or complete a task.
In early grades, students in Finland learn technology skills by playing actual games.
In slightly higher grades, teachers dressed as pirates, having stashed treasure around the school and teams of four to six students had to decode directional commands and cues and maps to find it. Again, going outside their classes, using the building blocks of coding – logic and sequencing and problem solving. They moved, walked and ran around.
Sure, the kids had computer tablets and laptops too – every tech tool you can imagine. On the day I was there, they just didn’t use them much. And when they did fire them up for code-related game play, the lights were dimmed, oversized pillows were passed out and kids left their desks to snuggle in and play on their own. A few even spilled out into the hallways and common areas.
And, as mentioned, the kids in upper grades – fourth and fifth graders – played chess. Not online or on laptops. But on tabletops, with pieces they moved with their hands, against human classmates. When asked about the connection between a seventh century game and computer coding, the teacher told me the lessons were the same. Both required strategy and problem solving and creative approaches within set rules.
Finland isn’t the only place with creative approaches to teaching coding. As I’ve highlighted previously, some American schools use products such as SAM Labs that treat computer literacy in early grades as a hands-on activity. The creativity exists at upper levels too. Massachusetts technology teacher Bram Moreinis is working with Lucid for Education, using the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons to open up coding concepts. But those are exceptions.
The lesson of this school in Finland using chess to teach coding is not the intriguing old versus new dichotomy. It’s the fluidity. When asked where the idea for using chess in technology learning came from, the principal told me, “a student suggested it.”
She continued that, two years earlier, they had a student who was precocious at chess, who loved it, played it at home. That student told teachers that the lessons of coding were similar to the skills needed to be good at chess. The teachers discussed it and added chess to the curriculum.
A student suggesting a 1,300 year old game to teach computer proficiency is interesting. A school system that can incorporate that idea into their core teaching in two years is transformative. That would never happen in the States.
For as much as we hear about the pace of change in technology, that’s probably a problem. The ability of education leaders in Finland and elsewhere to treat technology as a tactile, spatial experience and adjust their curriculum to good ideas are ingredients in the country’s successful education sauce. We’d be smart to take both pages from their cookbook.
