How to Teach Kids Coding | Teach Coding for Free with NO Experience

steve jobs once said that everyone in this country should learn how to code because it teaches you how to think learning to think and solve problems will not only help a child with their coding skills but also with their life skills and academics studies have shown that children who study computer science perform better in other subjects excel at problem solving and are 17 more likely to attend college even with the growing amount of technology at our fingertips coding can be a very intimidating topic for some parents or teachers to teach if they don't know any coding themselves teaching kids how to code doesn't have to be as scary as it might look i'm going to show you how you can start incorporating more coding lessons into your day for free hi i'm stacy with kids learning for life and today i want to show you that you don't need to know how to code in order to teach coding to your kid it's okay for your children to see you learning how to code right alongside them and maybe even learning a thing or two from them i'm going to share with you some free resources that you can use to start teaching coding to your kids today up first is code.org code.org is a 100 completely free website where students from k through 12 can go to figure out how to code students will create their own games art digital stories all while learning computational skills collaboration and persistence code.org provides lessons that are plugged and unplugged a plugged activity just means that your student will be on the computer doing the lesson an unplugged activity is perfect for those times where you aren't near a computer and you still want to teach your kid those coding and logic skills these unplugged activities are great for those hands-on learners that really want to see and move things around and figure it out on paper first then they can take those skills and apply it to the computer even though the lessons are very step-by-step and student friendly code.org also includes teacher lesson plans for all of the lessons if you don't know how to code these lesson plans will allow you to be able to preview the material and look at everything before you teach it to your kids code.org also incorporates a few extra lab activities that students can do as well in the app lab students can start to create their own app they'll use the system interface to come up with a design and build an app that will actually work the game lab allows students to go in and create their very own game they can create different characters or maybe a maze and have it be actually playable online the web lab is where students can start to create their very own website using code code.org has also sponsored the hour of code event hour of code can happen at any time and anybody can create an hour of code activity on the hour of code website you'll be able to find lots of different activities and games that children can play to extend more code learning you can search by grade ability level or even block versus text coding block coding is suggested for younger users because it has all of the words inside of a block and you can connect the blocks together to create your code while text coding is recommended for older users that already know how to spell words and type on a keyboard because they're going to be typing out their code in full form i would best recommend the hour of code app if your kids are really seeming to pick up code and you're looking into maybe another paid version of coding this could be a great place to look at some of those other third-party vendors there are lots of other paid coding platforms out there that you can try out such as code monkey codeable tinker and kodakid just to name a few and each of these companies have created a little hour of code so think of it kind of like a sample so you can try out some of the activities there to see which program your kid might like best before you have to go and buy something if you choose the next program i want to mention is scratch scratch is a simple block coding website that allows students to create simple images stories games and more all on the website scratch has tutorials right on their website that will help teach you step by step how to do some of the different activities but remember with coding you really can do almost anything so really let your children use their imagination and create anything they can put their mind to for younger coders you can use scratch junior and this is available on the ipad scratch junior uses the simple block approach but in this version they're using images rather than actual words scratch jr also has tutorials in their app that'll teach you how to do some fun things if you'd rather be able to have the scratch junior tutorials more tangible then you can try the scratch junior tutorial book this basically has all the same tutorials but in a print form so you can just simple simply open it up and be able to walk your child through what they're trying to figure out the next resource i want to recommend is khan academy khan academy has a couple different computer science programs they have computer science computer programming computers in the internet and pixar in a box the first three are going to walk you through some of the basics of computer science the internet and even some programming the step-by-step lessons have videos embedded and even some texts that you're able to read through and follow along in their program the khan academy program is self-paced so students can pick and choose how much they want to do each day the pixar in a box program goes over what it takes to create computer animation if you have a young animator in your life and they are interested in maybe becoming a computer animator this is a great place to start and just kind of let them see what it takes to be a computer animator and what skills they're going to need the last resource i want to recommend is going to be a completely computer-free option i found this free resource on the research parent blog and they offer a free printable that allows you to take coding from the computer and puts it into something tangible that you can hold the free printable includes all sorts of little cards that you're going to have to cut out but like turn left and go forward and turn right oh that's still go forward there's a turn right in here somewhere there it is and what you can do is it will also give you different mazes and so it's intended to work with legos either duplo or the regular-sized legos and you lay the mat out build your little lego maze around it and then your children will be creating the code using basically block coding but in paper form so this is kind of similar to maybe an unplugged activity that code.org would have but here it's a free printable that you can cut out and you could even laminate them i just don't have a laminator so i have not done that yet but you can laminate them so your kids can create their own mazes and use this to guide a little character so that you can come over and they create the code and then you can run it through form and say hey let's see if this works and see if you can get the little character from the start all the way to the end my kids had a lot of fun with this activity and i'm definitely going to be keeping all of these in a little container so that we can use them in the future there you have it some free resources that you can start using today to start learning and teaching your children how to code coding doesn't have to be scary and it doesn't have to be super time consuming again it's okay to go through these lessons with your child and you guys learn together it's important for kids to see that their parents are still learning new things even when they're all grown up do you know of any other free resources that parents can use to help teach their kids coding stick those down in the comments and share them with us so that we can all learn together if you like this 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Channel: Kids Learning for Life

Views: 102,576

Keywords: How to teach kids coding, coding for kids, programming for kids, coding for beginners, programming for beginners, coding, how to teach kids programming, teach coding for free, free coding resources, scratch, scratch jr., khan academy, pixar in a box, code.org, hour of code

Id: _7lMYRzCm74

Length: 8min 9sec (489 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 15 2021