Code Camp

What does code have to do with art and music? Can children already program? How creative can working with minicomputers or robots be? There will be answers at the Code Camp on October 17 and 18, 2018, at the ZKM!

The Code Camp, organized jointly with the »Code Your Life« initiative and sponsored by the Innovation Fund of the state of Baden-Württemberg, brings together children and young people from different backgrounds and lets them program digital art together in heterogeneous learning groups. For two days, the exhibition »Open Codes. The World as a Field of Data« becomes the headquarters for everyone who wants to discover coding.

Workshop formats

In various workshop formats, children and young people learn the language of the digital world, code: In the morning, there are 90-minute taster coding workshops for 3^rd to 10^th grade school classes. In the afternoon, families with children and teenagers aged 8 and over are invited to immerse themselves in the world of programming through art and creativity.

With the help of a digital drawing turtle, the groups program their own artworks, which are presented to the audience in »Open Codes« and shared via social networks. Existing knowledge of the children and teenagers can be integrated into more profound tasks and impressive works of art can be created for the screen. The drawing robot »Mirobot« finally puts the works on paper. Depending on the level of knowledge, this is done with simple command sequences or scripts with loops up to variables and sub-functions. Graphic spiral constructions, fractal and iterative forms as well as figurative and abstract picture compositions come into their own.

The common language of the Code Camp: Code

Children and young people from different cultural backgrounds are invited, both with German as their native language and young people with no established German vocabulary. The code is in the foreground in the formats and forms the connecting language across all languages. In heterogeneous groups, children and young people explore the code and draw analogies to a foreign language. Syntax and vocabulary, command sequences and constructions, algorithms and structural principles are just a few examples.

The Code Camp pursues the goal of opening the cultural and social space museum to young people, of making them together creators of something new and at the same time of promoting social coexistence across language borders.

The initiative »Code your Life« is part of the worldwide program »Microsoft YouthSpark« and is implemented by the 21^st Century Competence Center im fjs e.V. (21CCC).

On October 18, 2018, there will be a public final presentation from 6 pm to 7 pm, to which all – whether participants or not – are invited!