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9 Ways to Teach Kids of all Ages to Code

Preethi Chandrasekhar April 03, 2019

Learning to write at least some code has become a necessity for all kinds of jobs. Teaching our children to understand and write code has become one of the aspects of a complete STEM education in schools that will prepare our kids for the future. Here are 9 games, apps and websites our kids have tried and loved.

Before we start, download this fun printable from Hello Ruby! 

This is a foldable computer that you can color and design. 

1. Robot Turtles Board Game for Preschoolers

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Photo credit: https://flic.kr/p/vWQTGw 

Robot Turtles is a collaborative board game that is perfect to introduce basic coding concepts to preschoolers. One turtle for each player has to move across to the center of the board to get at its gem. The robot turtle can only move step by step - forward, turn right and turn left. In higher level configurations of the game, the turtles have to blast through obstacles as well. Spatial skills are also challenged when the child has to decide which way the turtle should turn. A fun way to lay the foundations of coding.

2. Scratch Jr. for Grade Schoolers

Scratch by MIT teaches young kids to code and then collaborate on projects and remix other's projects. If you created a project on Scratch and shared it, others can remix it, comment on it and share it. And of course, it is free! Kids get to animate a "sprite" by dragging and dropping blocks of code that make the sprite perform certain actions. It is fairly simple, yet complicated enough to make you think. Kids over 7 years old will love to create their own animations, stories, and games. It can also be a wonderful way to spend time with your kids making up your own animated cartoons and games.

3. Tynker for Grade Schoolers

Tynker is an app that teaches grade schoolers to code. Kids get to animate a dragon step by step to get its treasure. The dragon can walk, jump, blast ice and fire to remove obstacles and turn around. As you level up, kids are introduced to the concepts of recursions and functions i.e. a set of repeated steps grouped together that can be called by a single block. My first grader is currently at this level. As the levels go up serious programming languages like Javascript and Python come into play build apps and games. We will definitely be sticking with this App to see where my daughter's interests and skills take her.

4. Bitsbox for Grade Schoolers

Bitsbox is a creative way to introduce kids to the work of programming. Kids are introduced to programming by making fun apps with sound and pictures. It comes with sample apps in the form of jokes and kids can create new apps on their own. They provide an environment to create and run their apps. It is a ton of fun and kids will absolutely enjoy it.

5. Terrapin for Grade Schoolers

If you want to introduce programming to younger kids, like bits box, Terrapin is yet another interesting software that lets you create different shapes and images with the logo computer language. "We got introduced to Terrapin Logo via kiddos school," says Vidhya and they have special discounts for students.

6. Coding for Middle Schoolers