About us
Hackworth Ltd is a bootstrapped private limited company based in London, United Kingdom. Our organization's purpose is to make programming more interesting to more children. We're also taking a novel approach to designing teaching languages and tools, incorporating what the programming community have learned about their craft over the last two decades, so that children who're using our tools will be prepared for the computing tasks of the decades ahead.
Our principles
Equal access & opportunity
Pre-university schools and volunteer-driven organizations have made wonderful progress towards the goal of increasing diversity in computing, but there's a long way to go. For example, young women and people of color still comprise a small percentage of primary and secondary school students who choose to take computing-related subjects, particularly computer science.
At Hackworth, we believe that broadening the appeal of programming will help increase diversity in computing.
Relevance is important
Studies show that students in introductory programming classes are more likely to stick with it when they understand programming's relevance to their personal interests, career goals, and to society in general, but programming is typically only used in computing subjects. Children who aren't interested in computing for computing's sake may not have an opportunity to discover how useful programming can be in other disciplines.
Hackworth will explore novel ways to apply programming to children's broader interests, from playing games to more serious issues such as climate change and environmental justice.
Optimize for learning
Most programming languages are designed for industrial use. These languages are optimized to solve problems that have nothing to do with the difficulties of learning to program, and their complexity is often at odds with pedagogy.
Languages designed for learning typically offer affordances such as informative error messages or block-based programming, but even these languages usually lack an effective means for understanding how programs are executed, which is helpful for developing a mental model of computation — understanding how a computer computes.
Hackworth are building on the work of existing learning languages by creating tools that help children visualize and reason about computational processes and the programs that generate them.
Our commitment
We're committed to creating a sustainable, ethical, and socially responsible organization. We don't rely on outside investment, so we don't face any pressure from third parties whose values aren't aligned with ours.
Hackworth exists to serve children and schools. Serving this market comes with significant responsibilities. These are our pledges:
- We will never subsidize our software or services using advertising.
- We will never sell anyone's data to third parties.
- We will never intentionally exploit compulsion loops in our software or services in order to monetize them ("loot boxes," micro-transactions, pay-to-win, etc.).
- We will not use cryptocurrencies or non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to fund our organization.
Our aim is to create programming tools and applications that provide meaningful, measurable educational value to educators and students.