Kano Summer Camp gets kids coding with art — without leaving the house

Kano is running a free online coding camp for kids this summer.

Kano Summer Camp, from the team behind the tiny Kano single-board computer, is a coding challenge that kids can access from any web browser. One of Kano’s apps, Make Art, is now available online, and it forms the basis of the three-week course that runs from August 10 to August 30, taking in coding principles like variables and loops through art.

Coding for kids is a big deal right now, with a push from organizations like Code.org — behind the popular Hour of Code initiative — to make them active, rather than passive users of technology. Parents now have a lot of ways to get their kids coding in a fun way, and Kano Summer Camp adds another free option this holiday.

Kids taking part in Kano Summer Camp will use code to draw a different summer camp-themed object each day. The daily challenges will take between around 5 and 30 minutes, and kids can share their completed work with family and friends. No prior programming knowledge is required.

Kano raised over $1.5M on Kickstarter back in 2013 for its coding computer that kids can build themselves. My kids tested it out earlier this year.

My 10-year-old daughter was impressed by its challenge-driven approach to teaching , saying, “It’s a bit like if you’re playing a game and you always make the same mistake, but then you think about a person that’s amazing at this [game] — they’ve done this before, and they’ve made the same mistake as me, and they learned and moved on. So that’s what you’ve got to do in Kano.”

Originally powered by the Rasberry Pi single-board computer, Kano now comes packaged with the more powerful Rasberry Pi 2 and retails for $120.