Glico has supported the growth and development of children for over 60 years. Through snacks and sponsorships, the brand is synonymous with Japanese childhood. Our snacks already make their way into the hands of children around Japan but we wanted to find a way to create something with real utility that truly aided a child’s development. While the world embraces programming education, Japan’s school curriculums are dated and lagging behind. So how could we combine the latest technology with the magic of our brand allowing our kids to keep up? We created GLICODE, the first ever educational app that uses image recognition to turn candy into code, teaching the fundamentals of programming. The app turns three popular products into bite-sized programming lessons which teach three basic principles: "BASIC SYNTAX", "IF STATEMENTS" and "LOOPS". GLICODE has already made its way into elementary schools and it's been incorporated into the national curriculum.

GLICODE is the first ever educational app that uses advanced image recognition to turn candy into code to teach kids the fundamentals of programming.

We turned Glico’s most popular products, Pocky, Almond Peak and Bisco into a new visual language that represent three fundamentals - BASIC SYNTAX, IF STATEMENTS and LOOPS. The use of physical objects helps younger children learn more intuitively. They simply need to lay out candy sequences to instruct the game’s character how to move. Once laid out, capture the physical sequence and the mobile app automatically transforms it into executable code!

We launched GLICODE across Japan working with elementary schools to get these bite-sized coding lessons into classrooms. We also distributed starter packs and lesson plans to school teachers and programming schools around the country and are continuing to work with Google’s Hour of Code initiative to champion computer science and programming amongst children and parents.