Osmo Coding is a fun and simple way to introduce coding to your child. Children snap together physical blocks to create sequences of commands that guide Awbie, a playful digital character, through an interactive game.
Helping Awbie navigate the make believe world empowers children to learn basic computer programming skills by making coding a fun, accessible, and hands-on activity. Osmo Coding promotes collaboration by making it simple for children to navigate Awbie’s world together.
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When we started Osmo, Jerome and I didn’t really know where it was going to go. We had a dream, but looking back we didn’t understand many things. A lot of our learnings have come by trying things and failing. We are trying to create a whole new space that didn’t exist a couple of years ago. Learning is built into the DNA of our culture. It’s an important part of growing up as a company and also an important part of growing up as a child. That’s why letting kids make mistakes and define their own boundaries is important. For example in Coding, Awbie lives in a fantasy world with lakes, trees, and different terrain. Whenever the kids see a lake they want Awbie to go in the water. It always happens. Adults don’t do that. An adult knows that Awbie is going to drown. Kids want Awbie to jump into the water and see what happens. They are able to do that and we made it fun. He jumps in and then he comes back again.
Kids inherently want to experiment. That’s how they learn. In our products, we always want to make sure that experimentation is fun and not a friction. How do you take experimentation from a child not doing what you intended to making their idea exciting for them? We have gotten better at this by testing with children and saying: ‘If you want to do that, let’s make sure it is fun in the game.’ We try to give children as much freedom as possible to experiment in every product we build. It can’t feel like it is the wrong thing to do. What has surprised you the most about the way kids play? One of the things that surprised me the most is the variance among kids. Kids are so different from each other. You typically interact with a few kids in your lifetime but as you start interacting with different kids what works for one might not work at all for the second one. The variety of interests and personalities is amazing. That humbles us at Osmo. It’s very hard to build products for everyone. We try to do a lot of experimentation to make sure that a product is built in a way that works with as many kids as possible. Our hope is that we get different kinds of kids excited.