At Home with your Kids? 10 Fun & Engaging Ways Teens Can Build Digital Skills

With 1.2 billion young people across 120 countries currently at home due to school closures, I began thinking about how I could take my work with out of school youth and apply it to the current turn of events. According to UNESCO, out of school youth numbered at 258 million worldwide prior to recent events.

This is especially challenging for young people trying to balance social distancing needs with the many parents who are now being asked to help their children keep up to date with school curriculum.

I have been seeing a heightened number of social media posts from parents crowdsourcing ideas centered around keeping their children busy, healthy, and educated. The times we are in remain especially challenging for working parents and bring many to consider what homeschooling might mean for their families.

This piece is not meant to establish an end-to-end homeschooling journey, advise on health practices, or other activities possible at home. My jam is empowering the world with digital skills and making meaningful use of the internet. With that in mind, I came up with a list of ten of my favorite ways a high school student can build digital intelligence.

10 Fun Ways for Teens to Build Digital Skills

1.      Digital Competence Wheel

Start by testing out your digital skills based on a wheel of competencies that evaluates knowledge, skills, and attitudes in relation to the use of tech when it comes to performing tasks, solving problems, communicating, managing information, collaborating with others, as well as creating and sharing content in an effective, appropriate, secure, critical, creative, independent, and ethical fashion. I got an 88%; however, my partner who is less into the tech world received a 15%. Regardless of your age, we all have a ton to learn as we move through the journey of learning, applying, building, and influencing others. While the age group of the platform is not clearly defined, I am guessing it is appropriate for anyone over the age of thirteen. Parents – you should try this too!

2.      DQ Institute

The DQ Institute houses my absolute favorite framework on the planet for understanding what is meant by digital intelligence. This is the reason I became a Founding Member of the Coalition for Digital Intelligence – a group made up of collaborators from the World Economic Forum, OECD, IEEE, and the DQ Institute. DQ has landed in more than 80 countries, impacted more than 1M children, and has content in more than 21 languages. The DQ model targets primary, secondary, and high school youth and includes a robust set of definitions for understanding the skills needed in our ever-evolving digital world, including managing your online identity, usage, safety, security, emotional intelligence, communication, and rights. The last component included in the framework is what DQ refers to as digital literacy, which is described as media and information literacy, content creation and computational thinking, as well as data and artificial intelligence literacy. It’s applicable to teens, anyone online, parents, and educators. I love the way this framework does not simply see digital literacy as learning to code and does not assume that learning to code or being an engineer is the only definition of what it means to be digitally literate.

3.      Code.org

Even though Code.org is geared toward youth, I must admit that I got my first coding education via the Hour of Code program introduced by Code.org. That said, its target group is youth, and I have seen young ones as early as four utilize their tools, but recommend youth be of a reading age first, as it is more self-sufficient this way. The Code.org team has taken the combination of gamification and introducing the introductory building blocks of learning to code and turned it into an art. It’s so simple to try that us non-engineers can lead classes without having computer science degrees. There are even tutorials now on artificial intelligence. 74M projects have been created via Code.org and 20M students who use its tools are young women. The site has solutions for teachers, students, and simple games that only require an hour. I have 100% gotten sucked into several iterations of the team’s Hour of Code options!

4.      Scratch

Created by MIT Media Lab, Scratch enables youth to create and share stories, games, and animation online. There are solutions for youth, as well as ideas for parents and teachers. The focus of Scratch is to encourage computational thinking, creativity, collaborating with others, and practicing reasoning skills. It’s designed to be used by youth between the ages of eight and sixteen. I have used the Scratch tool in hundreds of coding camps…they land very well for youth.

5.      Let’s Talk Safe Tech

As an IBMer, I was absolutely thrilled when I saw the announcement in January of 2020 of Let’s Talk Safe Tech, which is a framework, curriculum, and activity kit to help keep young girls safe online. Regardless of your age, we are all at risk of cybersecurity attacks, and youth are especially vulnerable. During the first half of 2019, more than 4.1 billion records were exposed and nearly 93% of data breaches started from attacks that targeted people (Yes, YOU!). Let’s Talk Safe tech is designed for young girls between the ages of 10 and 16, and includes storing information online, sharing data, and keeping online accounts secure. There’s even a fun quiz! That said, it’s quite relevant for the newly connected as well.

6.      CS Unplugged

Ok, how cool is it to imagine learning computer science without a computer? Its site includes tons of teaching material via games, activities, puzzles, crayons, string, and cards! There are lessons for youth between the ages of five and ten.

7.      Open P-Tech

Geared toward high school students and educators, Open P-Tech offers both technical and professional development and skill-building opportunities that go beyond the boring theoretical stuff. As a speaker with the Open P-Tech movement, I am a big fan of their work and am looking forward to introducing youth-led webinars and videos into their curriculum. What a better way to approach youth – for youth, by youth, with youth…right?

8.      Master the Mainframe

When you use an ATM card or check on flight options, these transactions are supported by tech solutions such as those powered by IBM Z. IBM Z is known for its security, safety, and scalability. As an IBM Z Developer Advocate and fan of opportunities to learn about Z, Master the Mainframe enables students from the age of 13 to learn and experiment across three skill levels. In these simulated exercises, your teen learns the skills IBM Z programmers use every day when making your ATM card magically work wherever you are and whenever you want to use it.

9.      BBC micro:bit

We have not yet talked about IoT and robotics! For young people looking to get their hands on sensors and build things with their hands, micro:bit is MY JAM! I have mentored young people who have led tens of thousands of coding camps in scores of countries from around the world, and eyes always light up when building that first robot or IoT device, especially when combining their learning with the mobile application development course noted below. The micro:bit team includes project ideas for students, as well as educators. I have personally been involved in working with youth as young as thirteen using micro:bit; however, the platform provides project ideas for youth in two age groups: seven to eleven and eleven to fourteen.

10.  MIT App Inventor

We have also not talked about mobile application development yet! This is another place where I have mentored tens of thousands of youth and witnessed the creation of apps that integrate IoT and a mobile application for bees to apps that help empower youth in North Africa with skill-building opportunities to everything else in between. MIT App Inventor is another creation from MIT that focuses on enabling anyone anywhere to build apps with social impact. Their solution has representation from all countries in the world and has reached 8.2M people with 34M apps. There are tutorials, forums, and teacher tools. There’s even an AI tutorial! It’s based on a drag and drop methodology of using blocks to build apps, and includes curriculum for primary school, middle school, high school, and university students.

What did I miss?

Want a PowerPoint presentation to go along with this blog? You can find it here.

What did I miss?

Do you have other solutions to share that are not on my list? There are so many, right?! You can carry along in the conversation on Twitter. Excited to see what youth create with these learnings! You can share their magical creations by tagging me in Twitter at mentorafrika.