CoCo – a new collaborative coding platform for young people

Publication date: February 16, 2023

The CoCo platform, which was developed by PhD students at MIT Media Lab in the Lifelong Kindergarten Group, is a communities-centric co-creative learning platform designed to empower educators to support young people, both in the classroom and remotely, in being creative together. In fact, the values of beingness (the state of being), creativeness (the state of being creative), and togetherness (the state of being together) are the three main pillars of CoCo and are the core values that motivated the developers in their work. 

CoCo is a shared digital space for co-creating projects in real time and is designed to support young people to co-create, code, and collaborate with peers in both block-based and text-based coding environments. It also provides a way for educators to create their own safe private communities for learners.  

Through the platform, young people can build creative projects together with their peers in a shared digital space. The platform also allows them to see others’ projects evolve in real-time and to take a peek inside anyone’s project for inspiration. 

Users of the platform can use signal blocks, waves, and shared variables to programme together a variety of new collaborative experiences, including multiplayer games, chain reactions, interactive animations and much more. They can also create private or public corridors for their communities and host live co-creative spaces for community members.  

With its goal helping educators to engage young people in coding anywhere and anytime, CoCo shares many of the values of EU Code Week, which also has the objective of bringing coding and digital literacy to everybody in a fun and engaging way.  

Click here to try CoCo with your EU Code Week community, find out more about what motivated the CoCo creators in this blog post, and make sure to follow the project on LinkedIn and Twitter.