Katie scores with her brilliant baked potato game
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Nine-year-old coding fan Katie Howden of Wick has come up with a baked potato game which has gone down a treat at a Scottish professional football club.
The Noss Primary School pupil signed up for an online coding club run through Heart of Midlothian's Innovation Centre during lockdown and one of the tasks was to create a game in a Matt Lucas Thank You, Baked Potato challenge on Twitter.
Asked how she felt about her game being tweeted, Katie said she was happy that lots of people could play it. The clever design involves clicking on a rapidly moving baked potato.
Katie's mother, Amanda, explained that the club was like a Google Classroom with the participants taking part in different challenges.
She said: "One of them was called the baked potato challenge where you had to create a game – she created it and submitted it and did not think anything more of it, and went on to the next task. Then, out of the blue, we got a phone call to ask if it was okay if they used her name and age to put it on the Hearts Twitter feed."
Katie and her twin sister Kara have been enjoying taking part in the coding activities while staying at home in Wick's Murray Avenue.
Their older sister Tanya (24) has been involved with the Innovation Centre since it was set up by the football club a couple of years ago to offer young people free and accessible digital education programmes in the community.
Just before lockdown she joined the team full-time as digital education programme manager and online clubs were quickly organised for young people from eight to 18 through Google Classroom.
Tanya said: "I saw this as a great way to support families with home-schooling and keeping young people entertained. It also allowed for us to engage with young people across the UK who may not be able to get involved with our programmes at the stadium so we have seen young people from Wick all the way down to London getting involved which has been amazing.
"We came across the catchy Thank You, Baked Potato tune that Matt Lucas published and thought it would be a fun way to support our young people with understanding what social distancing is, so we set them a coding challenge to create a game that made use of baked potatoes.
"We had quite a few entries from young people online and Ann Park, who is the director for community and partnerships at the club, thought the game that Katie submitted was brilliant and she really wanted to share it with Matt Lucas himself. So we arranged for posts to go out on social media sharing the game – I believe Matt Lucas has also liked the tweet too.
"She has done an amazing job to create that game from home with very little help required from either myself or any of our other mentors. I know subjects like coding and computing can be quite intimidating to some, but I have been amazed at all of the hard work and enthusiasm all the young people on our online classes have shown during these unprecedented times."
Tanya explained that the club was on a mission to help young people become a more representative part of the technology industry workforce in the future, particularly addressing the worsening gender imbalance that the sector is currently facing.
Research by groups such as Skills Development Scotland highlights that only six per cent of girls at school aspire to work in technology compared with 31 per cent of boys.
She said: "We believe that the power and reach of football and sport allows us to reach lots of young people and community groups that may not originally have thought that technology and coding was something of interest to them, and smash stereotypes of what an engineer or scientist looks like or does.
"Many people may not realise just how much technology is used at a football club, such as helping the coaching team make decisions from the data captured from players during training sessions and games."
Katie's game can accessed on https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/395031334
More information about the Innovation Centre can be found here.
