From playing games to building rockets: Portugal's Ubbu brings coding to primary school

Published on

07/08/2026 - 15:00 GMT+2

Yet one last lesson has the pupil’s full attention in a primary school class . Tablets in hand, they navigate colourful games, solve puzzles or explore the International Space Station. They are learning coding through Ubbu, a Portuguese computer programming platform for children aged six to fourteen.

"It looks like they're playing games, but they're actually working on lots of different things," says teacher Teresa Cary. "They need to understand how to use a computer, how to make a robot do something. They need logic, it's actually maths."

Ubbu was developed by Code for All, a startup founded in 2015 by João Magalhães and a group of friends.