Detective Dot books aim to encourage kids to code without stereotypes

A British technology startup is hoping to encourage children to learn programming skills through a series of stories that avoid traditional stereotypes around engineering, science and technology.

Bright Little Labs is trying to raise £12.5k on crowdfunding website Kickstarter to make a series of print and digital books aimed at 7-9 year-olds, based around its characters of Detective Dot and her “former designer t-shirt” Mr Tumble Cotton.

The company was founded by Sophie Deen, who previously ran the computing training program for primary-school teachers in the UK run by programming-clubs network Code Club.

“In kids cartoons, 0% of princesses are engineers, 2.9% of characters are black, and Batman doesn’t recycle. And kids spend up to 9 hours in front of screens seeing this stuff everyday,” explains Detective Dot’s Kickstarter pitch.

“We’re obsessed with buying stuff but we don’t know how it’s made or who made it. Kids media is heavily stereotyped. Children, particularly girls and minorities, need positive role models in engineering, science, technology, arts and maths.”

The stories will see Dot and Tumble travelling the world finding out how objects including memory chips and footballs are made, using computer science to solve problems they encounter along the way.

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“Stories give children a glimpse of the world outside their own, but currently they’re warping their ideas about the world, themselves and others. I want to change that,” said Deen, stressing the stories’ focus on science, technology, engineering and maths topics (STEM).

“We need strong female characters like Dot to encourage young girls early to get into STEM and coding, and to make the whole space more accessible to children, and parents too.”

Bright Little Labs is not the first example of a crowdfunding campaign for a book with a more inclusive approach to children and coding. In 2014, Finnish developer and educator Linda Liukas raised $380k on Kickstarter to produce her book Hello Ruby, which has since been released in print and digital form.