Teaching Kids Drag and Drop Coding with Code.org and its Free!
- Afiqah Ayauf
- Aug 29, 2015
- 3 min read
As society advances further into the Information Age, demand for computer science and computer skills will increase. As more and more businesses go digital and implement their online presence in addition to their brick and mortar establishments, more workers with these skills need to fill this need.
Even for the individual, coding is advantageous as it a powerful skill that can generate building blocks of a program, application, and/or software that may create value to benefit the individual.
Learning specific programming (such as C, python or C++) or/and web coding languages (HTML, CSS, Javascript) would be difficult for young children under the age of eight or nine, but coding principles and other elements of programming is not difficult to learn, even for children as young as five.
There are also programs that teach coding to even younger children, but in this post, I am going to discuss only one program/website that I use to teach my middle and high school computer class students coding, which is Code.org.
Code.org features a few pathways that a young programmer can take to learn the basics of drag and drop coding. One of these pathways, called 'Hour of Code', allows users to move Elsa and Anna (yes, from Frozen) by dragging and dropping codes into an editor provided on the website.
The 'Hour of Code' program has 20 puzzles, with videos that kids can watch to learn skills in order to solve each puzzle. A second pathway, which is 'Write Your First Computer Program' is easy enough for four year olds, but adults who wants to learn programming may use this course as well.
These courses from on Code.org, teach learners basic algorithms and other programming principles without requiring teachers or parents to have programming knowledge, allowing children with parents with no programming knowledge to be exposed to this programming principles and learn by themselves if the need arises.
In fact, many parents today do not know programming. It is safe to assume that a majority of parents in America, let alone worldwide, do not know programming, but may desire their children to learn coding skills at a young age.
For those parents that would like to give preliminary coding exposure to their kids without initially investing on programming tutors, giving Code.org a try may give their kids the opportunity to demonstrate their talents in this skill, or just for them to learn the basics before going onto the more pricey courses.
This coding website is gaining popularity among public schools in the United States, and has partnerships with more than 70 school districts, including school districts in Washington, Ohio, Texas, Massachussetts and California among others. It is also featured in several articles, including one by The Huffington Post on this link, and another one by The Washington Post on this link.
Kids of today have an amazing opportunity to learn code with convenience. In this age and time in which kids can learn as long as they have access to internet and a computer, it would be a waste to not learn something that has been offered for free.
The creators of this website believe in providing access to learning computer science skills to as many children as posssible. It is now up to parents to encourage and guide their kids to learn this skill. Give your kids the gift of learning code today, with Code.org at this link: https://code.org/learn
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