Kids coding

Scratch vs CodaKid: Which Kids Coding Website is Best for Your Child?   Earlier this fall, we took a deep dive into kids coding websites Tynker and CodaKid, both Parents’ Choice Gold Award winners and CODiE Finalists for Best Coding and Computational Thinking Solution.   This week we will compare CodaKid and MIT Media Lab’s Scratch,…

Tynker vs CodaKid Review: Which Kids Coding Website is Best for Your Child?   In the world of online kids coding education, there are several different strategies used to teach kids how to program.   Today we are going to take a deep dive into Tynker and CodaKid, both CODiE Finalists for Best Coding and Computational…

Top 5 Myths About Kids Coding Exposed   According to Google Trends, interest in kids coding has skyrocketed over the past 5 years.   Parents have taken note of the massive, unmet demand for computer programming skills in the labor market, and administrators and teachers are beginning to respond.   Taking matters into their own…

Whether you have a career in computer science or whether you are a newbie that is interested in supporting your child’s interests, the art of teaching the basics of programing to kids can be a challenging task.   Common questions that we encounter running a successful online kids coding academy are numerous. When is the best age…

Today’s kids have remarkably different childhoods than previous generations.   Naturally, just like Baby Boomers or other generations of the past, youngsters in the 21st century are raised by helpful parents and family members, while also becoming subject to the influences from  complex socio-economic and cultural factors of their time.   But children today are experiencing an influence that…

My daughter is growing up in a radically different world than the one I grew up in.  By age 3, she was successfully navigating drag and drop coding games on an iPad and solving puzzle games on my phone. Meanwhile, I didn’t get my introduction to computing until middle school on the then revolutionary Apple II. The…

Is Computer Coding for Kids a Fad or an Essential New Literacy? Global interest in kids coding is growing exponentially. There are a number of reasons for this trend, ranging from parental concerns about the robot apocalypse and its effects on unemployment, to reports of massive job growth in the tech sector. According to some…

A Beginner’s Guide to Teaching Kids Coding (Even When You Don’t Know How to Code) Kids coding is growing rapidly in popularity as more and more parents and educators see that it is an important 21st century skill best taught early and often. Too often quality coding options are not available in many towns, cities, and…

As the director of a kids coding academy, I am frequently asked my opinion on the best programming language for kids. In my early days, I would reflexively refer parents to visual block programs or user-friendly languages like JavaScript and Python. But I have since changed. My response now is to ask what the child is…