How to Get Your Kids to Try Coding
Are you wondering how to get your kids interested in coding, but don't know where to start?
Tip: Think of it like trying to convince a child to eat a new vegetable.
Make it fun
Present them with options
Combine the learning with their favorite game or pastime
1. Make It Fun
Most importantly, present coding as a fun and creative activity, not as something that is "good for you." Just as it's useless to repeat the health benefits of broccoli to get them to eat the furry green plant, you need to present coding as fun as drawing or playing a sport.
Lucky for you, today there are many options for the young learner that make coding as easy and creative as picking up a crayon.
Scratch (scratch.mit.edu) and Minecraft Education Edition (education.minecraft.com) are two tools that are used worldwide to teach kids how to code by moving around blocks of code, and not requiring typing skills. Kids as young as 6-8 years old can learn to love the basics of code with these two tools.
2. Present Them With Options
It's always a winning strategy to get kids to believe that they are choosing to do an activity. Like giving the kids two different veggie options (peas OR carrots) and letting them choose, it's good to give them a choice of what kind of coding they want to try. With coding, at every age group students can choose between programming languages and projects they can work on.
Ages 6-8: Scratch or Minecraft
Ages 9-14: Python, Javascript or Roblox
Ages 14-18: Python, Java, iOS mobile app
3. Combine the learning with their favorite game or pastime
Like adding slices of carrots into their favorite fruit smoothie, kids may not even know they are learning to code when it's presented to them as part of something they already like to do. For example, Minecraft and Roblox are both enormously popular online games that also have a coding education component.
Students can learn to use block coding in Minecraft and the Lua scripting language in Roblox (Lua is similar to Python and Javascript) to craft repeatable towers, obstacle courses and magical items that are not possible with the regular version of the game.
It is also a point of pride for kids to be able to tell their friends that they "coded" or "hacked" Minecraft or Roblox, that they want to learn more coding to impress their peers.
