Australian kids made these computer games

Coding could be on the national school curriculum if Labor gets its way. It might sound futuristic, but everyday Australian children are already making computer games.

Australian primary school children made these computer games. Source: Scratch

An Australian network of volunteers is teaching nine to 11-year-old children to make computer games, interactive art and other programs.

Code Club Australia teachers volunteer their time to pass on programming skills to girls and boys outside school hours.

Coding has been on the national agenda since Opposition Leader Bill Shorten used his official budget reply on May 14 to announce a plan to put coding on the national school curriculum.

"Coding is the literacy of the 21st century," Mr Shorten said in his speech.

Code Club Australia national program manager Kelly Tagalan welcomed the opposition leader's comments.

A stated goal of Code Club Australia is to have a club in every primary school across Australia. It currently has 78 locations across Australia, according to its website.

Learning to code is empowering and can help boost children's self confidence, Ms Tagalan, who has a background in teaching, said.

"It is such a buzz to help them start out on this journey, to teach them how to create, rather than consume technology."

“This helps give them confidence in their other school subjects,” she said.

Coding might sound mysterious to people who haven't learned the skill, but you don't need to be a genius to create simple computer games. These screen shots are all games created by kids.

Fish Chomp

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Australian primary school children made these computer games. Source: Scratch

“They amaze me, but these are everyday kids,” Ms Tagalan said.

Flappy Monkey

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Source: Scratch

Code Club Australia uses a visual language called Scratch to teach users fundamental programming concepts.

Unlike text-based programming languages, which can be intimidating to the novice coder, Scratch allows users to drag and drop code “blocks” to make games and other computer programs.

The fundamental concepts learned in Scratch – variables, loops, functions and condition statements – are found in the programming languages used to make phone apps and computer programs that most people use every day, including the web browser you're using to read this story.

Oscar and Herbert

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Source: Scratch

After learning Scratch, the children learn to use text languages HTML, CSS and Python.

The webpages you can see in a browser are structured using HTML and most pages today are styled with CSS, while Python is sometimes used to construct and maintain web applications.

Students in year five at Lindfield East Public School in Sydney made the three computer games shown above.

Bruce Carney, a volunteer coding teacher at Lindfield, says teaching coding to kids is incredibly rewarding.

"Fishchomp and Oscar and Herbert were both done by the same boy. He is very keen and very talented," Mr Carnery said.

"It is such a buzz to help them start out on this journey, to teach them how to create, rather than consume technology."

Help Penguin Find his Jingle Bells

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Source: Scratch

One of Code Club Australia’s founding board members, Peter Argent, said children who learned to code gained problem solving skills they could use in other areas of life.

Finding bugs and fixing problems in code could sometimes be difficult, but fixing those harder problems could be more rewarding when solutions are found, Mr Argent said.