Badges in CoderDojo

Today you can find badges or trophy systems in many learning platforms or learning apps. They are designed to motivate learning enthusiasts such as children, for example, in order to promote fun and learning progress. I asked myself to what extent badges and trophy systems can encourage children to learn programming and how they influence a child’s fun and self-motivation.

To do this, I first looked at research on the use of badges in education. In order to relate my study to our CoderDojo and the children, I incorporated experiences from our Coding in the Dojo workshop. It quickly became clear that Scratch was a suitable initial environment for thinking about badge design. So I took a closer look at the functions of Scratch to find out to what extent badges can be integrated here. The result was a huge function tree - everything you can do with Scratch.

As you can see from the function tree, the range of functions in Scratch is huge. Especially because the code blocks in Scratch can be combined individually to create numerous possibilities. However, this is also a challenge for badges and trophy systems, as certain requirements must be met in order to receive a badge. So instead of trying out the huge combination possibilities in Scratch, children would rather use predefined combinations that are rewarded with badges.

As a result of my small study, I came to the conclusion that we should not introduce any badges or trophy systems in CoderDojo for the time being.

From CoderDojo’s point of view, we want to get children excited about programming, but they should want to program out of their own motivation and enjoyment and be interested in the topics. Badges or trophy systems initially motivate children through rewards and successes. However, we want children to have fun and enjoy the process of programming and thus be motivated by the programming itself. The small study showed me that children are most likely to get excited about programming if you show them what you can do with programming. In this way, children can become curious about programming and computers themselves.