We are living in a digital era where gadgets from computers, smartphones to tablets have become an essential part of our lives. Even kids these days pick up an iPad as and figure out apps like how a fish takes to water.
With kids becoming more tech-savvy as time goes on, there’s no reason why they can’t learn the basics behind their favorite technology. That’s right, we’re saying that there’s no reason why you can’t teach your kids programming from a young age.
With kids becoming more tech-savvy as time goes on, there’s no reason why they can’t learn the basics behind their favorite technology. That’s right, we’re saying that there’s no reason why you can’t teach your kids programming from a young age.
This will not only develop the analytical programming skills of kids at early age but also help them get an idea that whether they want to become a programmer in future. Here we’ve put together for you 10 educational tools that can be used to teach and develop programming skills in kids. Most of the listed tools are based on a visual programming language which has drag and drop interface for programming. These colorful and engaging tools will ultimately help build up your child's programming skills.
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1. Hopscotch
Hopscotch says that programming is designed for everyone. By using Hopscotch, you can teach the basics of programming to your kid easily. Currently, you can only download the Hopscotch app for free on the iPad. Hopscotch allows your kids to develop their own games, stories, animations and other many interactive programs by dragging and dropping blocks of code. One can shake, tilt or even shout at the iPad to control the characters in program.
2. Scratch
Scratch is a programming language and online community, which is developed and maintained by Lifelong Kindergarten group at MIT Media Lab. Scratch is a free to use service and it allows your kids to create their own animations, games and stories. Your kids can share their creations with others around the world using the online community of Scratch.
3. Alice
Alice is a free to use 3D programming tool that allows one to create animations for telling a story, playing an interactive or a video to share on the web. The main purpose of Alice is to give your kids basic exposure to object-oriented programming. By using Alice, students will learn to create animated movies (containing people, animals and vehicles) and simple video games.
4. Tynker
Tynker is an online programming learning system designed to motivate kids to translate their creative ideas into games, projects and animated stories, and circulate their apps on the web. Tynker uses easy visual programming language in which no programming syntax is required but only blocks of codes are combined together to create programs. There’s a fee for lifetime access but they offer online self-paced courses, mobile puzzles and summer camps as well.
5. Hackety Hack
Hackety Hack is an easy to use programming tool which can be used to teach the absolute basics of programming. One doesn’t need any prior experience of programming before they start working on Hackety Hack. It is based on Ruby programming language. Ruby is used for development of programs such as desktop applications and websites. It is really easy to build graphical interfaces using the Shoes tool of Hackety Hack.
6. Kodable
Kodable is a free to use programming app for iPad. The tagline, “Learn to code before you know how to read” is embodied through their method of learning programming through a fun game. Kodable is specially designed for kids aged 5 years or above, so that they can learn programming by playing games with little instructions. Kodable has 3 levels of programming including K-2nd grade, 3rd – 5th grade and 6th – 12th grade.
7. Stencyl
Stencyl is fast, free and convenient. It allows you to develop games by using a drag and drop (block-snapping) interface, and no coding is required at all. If you do not want to use the block-snapping interface then you can type in code as well. Stencyl has extensive platform support and games developed on Stencyl can be played on Android, iOS, Windows, Mac, and Linux too.
8. RoboMind
RoboMind is a programming tool for kids which uses its own language called ROBO. It is a very simple language which does not require any previous knowledge of programming. The main objective of RoboMind is to move a virtual robot on a two-dimensional grid and perform simple tasks. By using RoboMind, your kids can learn the basics of artificial intelligence and later on even use it on real robotic kits such as LEGO Mindstorms NXT 2.0. RoboMind gives a 30 days free trial of their tools.
9. Etoys
Etoys is an easy to use programming tool that kids can use to create their own games, models and stories. An Etoys project can be developed by using graphics, animated objects, music, sound, scanned pictures and text. Etoys is free to use with a liberal license.
10. Waterbear
Waterbear is a convenient and free to use programming toolkit for kids which uses a drag and drop approach for programming purposes. Waterbear is a visual programming language which means there is no need to learn syntax to start programming with it. Kids can create a new file, look at examples of other creations and play around with the different features among other things. There are even descriptions for each element that are easy to follow as well.
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