For Japan’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT)’s website, we created a content which targeted the country’s future generation. The mission of the project was to spark children’s curiosity so that instead of passively using information technology, children would aspire to deepen their understanding and find new ways to utilize the technology.

Children today have grown up in constant contact with the digital world. Then, just as teaching the ecology and anatomy of living creatures is important, educating our digital native children how the digital world is built is crucial to help them gain an insight.

The response was exuberant at the time of the launch. It created a sensation among the programmers and other professionals in the field of information technology, and initiated a debate on the significance of teaching programming to our children.

Digital conscious parents gave Programin to their own kids to play with, and posted their children’s responses on blogs and social media. Although this was a promotional content, in some homes and classrooms it was used as an educational material. Furthermore, users independently published websites with portal functions to share the programs they developed using the Programin. Currently, six months after the launch, 66,000 programs have been developed, and 5500 of them are shared online.