Erase All Kittens goes from strength to strength

by Startacus Admin

Erase All Kittens, the EdTech startup that's on a mission to get kids, particularly girls, into programming, continues its global growth

Don’t worry; all of the titular kittens are still okay. In 2019, we wrote about Erase All Kittens, a startup dedicated to getting children aged 8-14 - girls in particular - more interested in programming. 

With the world becoming more digitised, the need for programming skills is forever growing, and with the increase in STEM jobs, the gender gap continues to grow. But since the ‘90s, the percentage of women in computer science jobs has dropped from 37% to 24%. While the actual number of women in these jobs may not be decreasing, as the need for those jobs increases, the interest from girls coming out of school remains low. This is where EAK hopes to make all the difference, and we thought we would check back in nearly 2 years later to see how they are doing.

London-based Erase All Kittens doesn’t teach children how to ‘hack the planet’ or build iPhone apps; it teaches them how to save kittens with HTML, the simplest programming language, upon which the internet is built. 

The premise is simple: you play a 2D side-scrolling game and save kittens by fixing the HTML code as you go. As always, the best way to learn is by enjoying it, so a game that you can have fun with while learning the fundamentals of how all programming languages work is deceptively powerful. Coming soon, the game will start teaching players CSS - a kind of add-on to HTML - and JavaScript as well. 

Their player base has risen since we last wrote about them to 160,000 players across 100 countries, mainly the UK and US, and is being used in 3,000 schools. The pandemic has also increased their traction by 500%, and in April 2021, the startup raised a $1 million seed round led by Twinkl Educational Publishing, with A Black Square and angel investors, including one of the founders of Shazam. This funding is allowing EAK to launch a whole new, revamped game in July to help teach these new languages and get more children, and more girls, interested in programming.

Everything from apps, to infrastructure, to your smart toaster needs programming skills these days, and there are few things better to learn for a child to get a head start in their work life.

 

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Published on: 19th May 2021