How to Teach Kids Coding (Parent Guide)

It is unnecessary to argue over the issue of the importance of teaching computer-operating skills to students.

How to use computers – is absolutely a must for the students in the course of their academic and professional life.

Teachers must focus on teaching the students how to code along with basic computer skills. In today's digitalized era, it is essential to introduce programming skills to the students.

Even the fundamental programming knowledge enables one to manage technological issues firmly.

Programming teaches vital skills of maths and logic. 

Many students are deprived of computer accessibility until college education.

This is one of the major drawbacks on the way to learn to program.

So, what is the solution?

Well! Currently, various programming tools are available online for students to offer knowledge on programming.

This article will discuss the whereabouts of some of the most popular tools.

1. Alice 

Alice is an open-source three-dimensional (3D) programming tool that teaches students event-driven and object-oriented programming.

Alice enables students to drag and drop the graphic lines to animate an object.  

Caitlin Kelleher developed Storytelling Alice as her doctoral project of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University.

The tool increases the interest of the students with the help of animations and social interactions. 

2. Scratch 

Scratch is a visual programming language.

The tool was created by MIT Media Lab in 2007 for children above 6.

Currently, nearly 800,000 users use the website and have share more than 1.7 million projects, including animations and games.

Sharing is a unique feature of Scratch.

The uploaded files on Scratch are open to download and modification.

The programming language is freely accessible.

You can use it on Mac, Windows, and Linux.

3. Arduino 

Arduino is an open-platform electronic prototype platform that consists of both hardware and software elements.

The hardware is programmed with a language like C++. The language is not considered to be the easiest to learn to program.

The projects using Arduino to introduce programming to children include a Scratch modification to support programming on hardware.

According to a recent Google announcement, it would enable the Android mobile devices to communicate with the hardware and look for different opportunities to work on this platform. 

4. Hackety Hack

Hackety Hack is an open-source tool that imparts basic programming in the Ruby language.

The effective tool offers interactive tutorials on Windows, Mac, and Linux computers. Hackety teaches the basics of Ruby syntax.

The tool offer students with solid language base to enable them to create their own apps using Ruby.

5. Lego Mindstorms 

Lego Mindstorm is famous for robotics-building.

The tool kits are available in educational and consumer versions with motors and sensors.

The programing is a command box, not code programming.

The tool kit of Lego comes with languages that can be changed to work with third-party languages. Lego was designed in the MIT Media Lab. 

Conclusion 

The above information consists of only a few of the tools to introduce programming languages to the children. Now, it is up to you which programming language tool you will choose for yourself?