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Programming Resources for Kids

Nick Taylor on March 28, 2020

For those of you with children at home during these “interesting” times that are teaching programming at home, what are your go to resources?

If possible, list the age range for the resource. Hopefully we can build an awesome list of resources here. 💪

Mike Chung • Mar 29 '20

Just discovered this book How To Train Your Robot, a free kids book by an engineer and his 10-year-old daughter. One note - "an engineer" is a professor at a prestigious university twitter.com/ken_goldberg/status/12...

Max Ong Zong Bao • Mar 28 '20 • Edited

Minecraft education edition they will be stuck with it for hours. If you teach them on how to program the npc or special effects.

Oh yeah one more is sonic pi. It's really cool that will instantly capture the kids interest in making music as a DJ

Comment deleted

Max Ong Zong Bao • Mar 29 '20 • Edited

As I'm a coding instructor to kids in the past.

The most important key is that you should get them interested in the fun way.

Either something physical that, provides rapid feedback or visual stimulating is the way to go for kids.

Sonic Pi By Sam Aaron at GOTO conferences

Nick Taylor • Mar 28 '20 • Edited

There’s definitely staples like:

Scratch (age 8-16)
Makecode for micro:bit with optional hardware (age 8-14)
Makecode for Adafruit with optional hardware (age 8-14)

I’ve also recently discovered Tynker (age 7+)

Aside from that, I’m looking to get my kids signed up to some virtual classes with codeclub.ca (age 7+)

One last mention. @nnja put on an amazing Twitch stream last week for kids using MakeCode and Adafruit.

Nick Taylor (he/him)

@nickytonline

@ThePracticalDev Just want to give a shout out to Nina who put on an amazing Twitch stream for kids who are at home right now doing the home school thing. It was a lot of fun with @adafruit and @MSMakeCode #DevDiscuss twitter.com/nnja/status/12…

02:00 AM - 25 Mar 2020

Nina Zakharenko 💜🐍 @nnja
There's now a date for this workshop! ✨Tuesday, March 24th at 11:00 AM PT✨ The stream will be on https://t.co/DrZhxy1cpI We'll be using https://t.co/StEOnnh1dB so all you'll need is a browser The materials & a recording will be available after for those who can't join live. https://t.co/hC9bYJBAbs

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Dzhavat Ushev • Mar 28 '20

I'm also interested in this. I have two girls at home 7 and 12 years old, and would like to start teaching them programming. The older one got a Micro:bit from school a couple of years back. She's already familiar with some concepts. I also have a Raspberry Pi. So we pretty much have the hardware. We played with the Micro:bit last night.

We also have a language barrier. They are not yet very good in English so I can't really leave them on their own. So I guess my responsibility is bigger and need to sit them down and start learning. :)

rhymes • Mar 29 '20

I recently saw this on Mozilla's blog: Learn web technology at “sofa school”:

Lots of kids around the world are learning from home right now. In this post, I introduce free resources based on web technologies that will help them explore and learn from the safety of their living rooms. VR headsets and high-end graphics cards aren’t necessary. Really, all you need is a web browser!