About RailCode

#About RailCode

###Why did we create RailCode? What can it be used for? How does it work? Find all this out and more...

###Why did we create RailCode

At school, we run a programming club for pupils in S1. Right from the beginning we found a core group of around twenty students that had a keen desire to learn programming. We gladly accepted them into our club and after a year we had managed to teach them skills normally found in pupils three or four years older then them.

This was fine, but after reading about the lack of programmers in the industry, especially girls, we wondered about ways to get more people interested in coding. We felt that it was the lack of awareness of the fun, creativity and empowerment that coding brings, rather than any technical barrier, that was keeping people back from learning to code.

Our solution to this problem is RailCode, a web-app that encourages young people who have never considered programming to get into coding. Using a metaphor of the London Underground, we built a game that expands out into a peer to peer learning environment.

We found that all of the existing languages and tools already out there were focused on refining the skills of those who already had a passion for programming, rather than encouraging people who had never considered what coding was like, and if they might enjoy it. To do this we needed to create a new programming language that reflected our target audience. We made this language as easy to use as possible, with no confusing symbols or syntax - in fact it is just like English.

We hope that RailCode will inspire a whole new generation of coders.

###How did you create RailCode

RailCode was created as a web-app mainly using PHP for any back-end scripts (e.g: the language translator, open-data collector and processor and the database access scripts. JavaScript was used for almost everything else: from the interactivity of the train to the random-station-generator. For the design we used a combination of Bootstrap, HTML and CSS.

###How can I use RailCode?

Everything we created is released either under the MIT License (for the code) or the creative commons attribution sharealike 4.0 license for the images and documentation. This allows anyone to take our work and adapt it for their own use without worrying about the restrictions of copyright (e.g: permission, fees, royalties).

RailCode can also be easily extended - even if you do not know any programming. We designed RailCode from the code to be extendible easily, and documentation on how to extend RailCode can be found on our Extending RailCode wiki page.

###Anything and everything else...

If you have any other questions about RailCode, do not hesitate to contact either David or Andrew Ferguson through the contact information provided by GitHub.