"So we're going to talk to a computer and ask it to change Minecraft?" Patrick, my eight-year-old son, sounds both excited and dubious. "How will we talk to it?"
"Well, we'll type in what we want it to do," I say, confidently. (Parenting is all about confidence.)
"And it will do what we say? Epic!" He settles back into his tube seat. Conversation over. "Can I have a go on your phone?"
I hand over my mobile, my pocket brain, my dazzling portable powerhouse processor that has more than 500,000 times the memory of the computer that landed Apollo 11 on the moon. My son takes it as casually as if it were a packet of crisps, types in my security code and starts playing Minecraft.
On 19 November last year, a new project was launched on Kickstarter. As with most of the ideas on the site, the world's largest crowdfunding platform, there was a video clip that explained what investors' money would be supporting. In the clip, two young men, Alex Klein and Yonatan Raz-Fridman, talked to camera while messing about in a children's playground. Their project – an easy-to-assemble computer kit for children, based around the micro circuit board Raspberry Pi – was called Kano. Inserts showed youngsters raving about it, a slam poet extolling it, the creator of the pioneering video game Pong enthusing about its potential. The clip finished with Klein and Raz-Fridman going up and down on a seesaw. See? Child's play.
Project Kano's funding target was $100,000: if the target was achieved, the Kano computer kits would ship in June and July of 2014. In less than 18 hours, $100,000 was clocked up, leaving a month to go until the funding deadline, 19 December. By that time, Project Kano had raised $1,522,160, from 13,387 backers. Two of those backers were Steve Wozniak, who designed the first Apple computer, and Yancey Strickler, one of the founders of Kickstarter. Another one was me.
Patrick and I are visiting Kano's office. Just a box, really, in a small avenue near Old Street, east London; a space with 10 or so young people of various nationalities sitting at computers, chatting sometimes, mostly not.
Klein – flop-haired, gangle-limbed, 23 – takes us into a small side room, where a prototype Kano is laid out in its cardboard case. It consists of a Raspberry Pi, an SD card with the Kano logo on, a specially designed small orange keyboard, a plug, a Wi-Fi dongle, a little speaker, a click-together box to hold the Pi and various brightly coloured leads.
"Can I have a go?" Patrick makes the Kano himself. He ignores the accompanying booklet and just plugs bits into the Pi, like he's building Lego – the SD card in first, then he clips the plug together. In a few minutes, he's done and we find ourselves gazing at a TV screen that fills with streams of code, ASCII typewriter-style stuff like I used to see in my short year of computer science lessons (1982-83). The code spools down like green rain.
Suddenly, the screen is blank. The cursor flashes, then types out: "Hi, I'm Kano. Thanks for bringing me to life. What should I call you?"
"Patrick", types Patrick.
"Patrick, follow the white rabbit," Kano responds; like The Matrix, like Alice in Wonderland.
Not that he cares (nor me). We're too busy discussing building a tower out of TNT and exploding it with lava. Then we make some synth music and have a go at Pong, changing the sizes of the paddles, making the ball big and orange, speeding it up. Pong is a big success with Patrick. I have to prise him away.
Before Klein became involved in Kano, he studied ethics, politics and economics at Yale, and then did a masters in political economy at Cambridge. He liked programming, but he also liked acting and story-telling. He became a journalist, for New Republic magazine.
One of the stories he covered was the Raspberry Pi. This small circuit board, the size of a credit card, was launched at the beginning of 2012 and became an instant success. Developed in Britain by Cambridge graduates who wanted to make computers and coding accessible to everyone, the Pi has given rise to an enthusiastic tech community, who use their Pi to create all sorts of amazing things: a robot camera that sends down photos from a balloon, a habitat for insects, a theatre lighting rig.
But there were those – and I am one of them – who found the Pi intimidating. To make it work, you had to do everything: locate a spare keyboard, plus all the right leads, work out the Wi-Fi, program the SD card. Still, the tech-literate loved the Pi, including Klein, who "hacked about with it". He showed it to his younger cousin (Micah, aged seven – he's in the Kickstarter film), but Micah found it too difficult.
Another story Klein covered was Occupy's Wall Street camp at Zuccotti Park. While sheltering from the rain in one of their tents, he asked the Occupy-ers why, if they hated big business so much, they all used iPhones and Samsungs.
"I said, because I'm a bit of a nerd, 'Why don't you join the open source movement? Free software, protocols that allow for minimising government or institutional surveillance and maximising individual control over technology.' I gave them the whole spiel. And they said, 'Yeah, that's fine – but these things aren't designed for us, they are designed by the Silicon Valley elite. The open source community are geeks and nerds and they created the current inequality in technology.' And when they hit me with that, I was like, 'OK, you're right.' "
Klein and Raz-Fridman, 30, an ex-intelligence officer for the Israel defence forces, thought they could use the Raspberry Pi's cheapness and open source software's flexibility to make computer coding easier for non-techy people: "for fun, and purpose". After all, if you're a non-tech person (and you can afford it), you are stuck with Apple, Sony, Nintendo, Samsung: slick, pretty, closed-off life accessories/computers that are far too expensive for you to risk prising the back off and having a look at what's inside, far too enmeshed in their own operating systems for you to hack in and have a mess around. Klein thought about this. He talked about it. He had an advantage: his cousin Saul (father of Micah) is an investment entrepreneur who co-founded LoveFilm, put money into Codecademy and was an executive at Skype. Saul knows how digital startups should run; he also understood that the Raspberry Pi wasn't quite as accessible as everyone had hoped. He was up for Klein and Raz-Fridman's idea.
"For me, the notion with Kano," says Klein, "on a micro level, was, 'Let's make a really fun computer kit for all ages.' And then, on a macro level, it was to link niche technology to people to help break down the social frameworks we've created in the past three decades. Gross social inequality, a management class that is more centralised than it's ever been since the Great Depression. And an economy that has tons of top-heavy growth, but none of the broadly distributed growth that was characteristic of, say, the 50s and 60s. That's the macro story." What Kano wants to do, then, is give power to the people.
There is a coding frenzy out there. Money is pouring into it, from hedge funders speculating on programming startups to ordinary people inspired to back projects such as the coding-for-infants toy Primo. Michael Gove has made coding part of the national curriculum: all secondary schools must teach coding, and primary schools introduce it, from September 2014. Recently, I heard Tony Hall, the head of the BBC, say in a speech that there were three languages in the world: English, Mandarin and code (a slightly hackneyed maxim, but still). Hall's enthusiasm means that BBC producers are currently scouting out all tech startups, phoning known coding gurus, asking them for Big Ideas. The Great British Code-Off? Strictly Come Coding? That kind of stuff.
More prosaically, schools are rushing around, frantically trying to skill up their teachers so that they can teach code. Code Club is an organisation that puts schools in touch with computer developers so they can help run after-school clubs for nine- to 11-year-olds. It is overwhelmed with requests. I know, because Patrick's school is one of them. No luck as yet: every available programmer is run off his or her feet, with a full-time job and umpteen help-me asks.
Emma Mulqueeny runs Rewired State and Young Rewired State, which bring self-taught programmers together, inviting them to events where they use open source data to make websites and apps that solve real-world problems. When she started Young Rewired State in 2009, with a one-day event, only three children turned up. Now, however, YRS is thriving and Mulqueeny has noticed changes. "The kids used to say, 'We'd never tell our friends that we spend time doing this,' " she says. "But now they're proud – they give talks to their year groups.
"We used to get the stereotypical, 15- to 18-year-old, isolated geek," she says. "Now, we're seeing 10-, 11-, 12-year-olds, more mainstream kids who might be brilliant at maths and were introduced to coding by their parents."
Brilliant at maths... hmm. Can everyone code? At the moment, coding is presented as an easy route to a well-paid programming job, as though every child will latch on to it and zoom from Scratch, where you get a cartoon cat to walk into walls, to complicated programming languages such as C++. But some people's minds don't work like that. You can show a group of kids an engine and only a few will want to take it apart to see how it works. Not everyone can code well enough to be a programmer.
"No," agrees Mulqueeny. "But children should have a degree of computational thinking. They should know that Google is an algorithm and what an algorithm is. If you introduce junior school children to the vocabulary of code, then it might spark an interest. And all kids need digital skills, so they're not only safe but in control of their digital world. Our kids' computer literacy at the moment is naff all."
(As an aside, she recommends that out-of-work 16-year-olds should have a go at learning Ruby, the programming language most often used in making mobile apps.)
We have an interesting talk about teaching. Mulqueeny believes that, fundamentally, coding lessons challenge much more than teachers' skills. They challenge what a teacher is.
"The traditional model is that the teacher imparts knowledge to the children," she says. "But if there aren't enough teachers with the knowledge, why not just let the kids teach themselves? Give them a list of websites and let them try stuff out." She recommends Treehouse, an American organisation that teaches coding by video in steps. "Or just go to YouTube and use it as your own private tutor. If you get stuck, ask Twitter."
There are teachers who are already coders (check out the inspirational Alan O'Donohoe, @teknoteacher on Twitter), but they are rare. After all, unless it's their hobby, why would teachers be computer savvy? Their work internet network is closed; very few of them have everyday experience of footering on the net, messing about on social networks, trawling YouTube, playing internet games, messaging friends, encountering safe and unsafe environments. They live different digital lives to their pupils.
So different, in fact, that some secondary schools send letters home telling parents not to let their teenagers on to Facebook or Instagram. You might as well demand that they don't fiddle with their bits.
We're on our way home from Kano. I'm thinking about their office and realise what it reminds me of: my old office at the Face magazine in the 90s. A small, motivated, slightly odd team of people who don't quite fit in anywhere else, obsessing about stuff they love. I also remember a quote that Mike D from Beastie Boys gave me back in those Face days. He said: "You can be entrepreneurial without being exploitative."
Klein said to me: "For a long time, the notion was, you build a business by doing whatever the hell you want, and then you institute a corporate social responsibility programme and throw a few bucks back. But the model that I think is growing now, and you see it with Kiva and with Toms Shoes, is … a realpolitik notion. For better or worse, we live in some of the most free-market times in history, and thus the lever to most quickly and effectively be an influence on the world is the free market. People can sponsor Kano kits to get them to Nairobi, or Johannesburg, or north London. It's all possible."
It's easy to be seduced by smooth gadgets that help you live your life. But there's a whole world out there that isn't as shiny, isn't as owned by corporations. It's possible to like Beyoncé and John Grant; to love your iPad and your notepad; to visit the Science Museum and go home and make a rocket out of Lego and land it on a football moon. Sometimes, my children spend hours playing computer games. Sometimes, they spend hours making homemade badges. They don't see the difference, really. If you allow kids in – to a museum, an institution, inside a closed world – they'll find a way to have fun.
Patrick is back on Minecraft on my phone. He looks up. "I really liked that," he says. "It was one of my favourite days. Can we get a Kano? I want to play with that Pong game."