Everybody knows and loves eating the Japanese snack food Pocky, don’t they? It’s those biscuit sticks mostly coated in chocolate that can be consumed in mere seconds. Well, now there’s another reason to buy Pocky over the other delicious snacks available at your local store: it can help teach you and your kids to code.
Learning to code using just the chocolate-covered sticks would be a difficult (and messy) task. Instead, the company behind Pocky, Ezaki Glico, has produced a free app called Glicode and made it available for Android (an iOS version is in development, apparently).
Glicode tasks the user with helping a character move around a 3D world filled with obstacles. Movement is based on a sequence of commands, which are issued by arranging Pocky into specific shapes and snapping a photo of them with your smartphone. The app translates the shapes into the relevant commands and the character moves accordingly.
It’s a very simple idea, however, one that offers kids something more than just a tasty snack to eat, which should sit well with parents making the snack-buying decisions. And of course, Glico isn’t just limiting this coding experience to Pocky. You can also use its Almond Peak chocolates and Biscuit Cream Sands to issue commands.
Hopefully Glicode will end up encouraging more children to get interested in programming their smartphone rather than just using and spending money on it. The one concern with that being these new programmers may also fuel their coding sessions with junk food, because that’s how they started out–sugary snacks and cute character manipulation.