8 Programming tools for children

The desire of every parent of a daughter to become a chicken, now thanks to the mobile tide, everywhere tablet, smart phone, Smart TV is full of our eyeballs, not only adults, even children like to hold a tablet in that "cut watermelon", experience the "Temple of the Great Escape" to bring the thrill of the feeling. Have you ever thought about letting your kids develop their own app apps while playing?

The author Nat Brown believes that age is not a problem, children can learn programming, learning programming is like playing basketball, football, playing the piano is also necessary skills.

The article reads as follows:

I have a 12-year-old son and a 8-year-old daughter, like all the parents in the world, and I want my children to be a great person, a great reader, a great mathematician, a scientist, something that interests them. As a senior programmer, I hope they can become a great programmer, develop a great application, I do not want them to become blind "consumers".

As a technician, I often discuss with my parents, teachers and friends about the plans for young children to learn programming and the "screen time" problem.

Screen time:creating vs. consuming

I think a lot of parents are worried that their children will spend a lot of time on computers, if they want to figure out whether they are "creating" or using computers, tablets, smartphones or even television.

Most parents choose to set screen time for their children, such as 15 minutes a day, and some can only play once a week. I am in favor of this, including playing games, watching entertainment videos and video games, and setting limits based on different family situations. (Most of my family like to read, we don't watch TV, weekends usually play xbox+kinect and ipad games, Friday or Saturday there will be a "movie night", we will not spend too much time on the screen. ）

In real life, however, we work on computers every day, including creating or adding forms, writing emails, writing memos, and so on. Therefore, the computer has become the necessary tool for our work, familiar with how to use the computer has become our necessary skills. Not just adults, it's a must for children. Therefore, the appropriate to let children in the computer Unlimited "development, create" is also the trend of development. For example, compiling programs, writing programs, quality education programs, programming, video editing, making slides, and so on, should be a way for children to learn, which is like learning to play basketball, football, piano, art, singing and other basic skills.

In my family, I allow my children to do some other activities on the computer (in the absence of any other work in school), including:

• Make slides, use family Photos/videos or make slides from their own photos/videos;
• Using a computer webcam or other art projects to create static video, here is recommended to use istopmotion;
• painting/making various programming patterns, recommending the use of Pixelmator or other ipad applications;
• Write stories/letters through applications;
• Create 3D models or animations using Blender;
• Learn the programming tools.

Children can also learn to program

Nowadays, there are many good tools on the Internet to help children learn computer programming. Unfortunately, these tools are not a good helper for young children. Therefore, you must be different from each other, local conditions, to find suitable for the age of children learning tools, in order to be more effective.

My son is now 12 years old, almost half of the tools (mentioned below) have been used, and the use of scratch at the age of 5 has now been used to develop IPHONE/IPAD applications using Stencylworks and Xcode; my 9-year-old daughter has tried a lot, But programming didn't interest her (I was trying to help her).

Below I will share several programming learning tools:

Scratch It is the best tool for young children to learn from scratch, complete programming by clicking and dragging, enabling children or adults programming beginners to learn the basics of programming. Because it's visual, it's easy to help children create graphical applications that can be viewed on a Web page, and in addition, it has a large children's community that shares their projects on relevant web sites. You can download, see how they run, and make changes on the basis of each scratch project. This tool is just like when we share open source projects in GitHub or ask questions and answers on forums, IRC, StackOverflow.

Cargobot designed for the ipad,robologic for iphones and ipads,Movetheturtle helps children learn how to program and think about how to accomplish tasks through logic. To program for fun, let young children learn more knowledge in playing.

Codea I have no experience with Codea and my children have never used it. Therefore, I do not comment here.

Crunchzilla 's Codemonster and Codemaven. These are developed by a friend of mine who also realizes that young children lack these learning tools, which are simple teaching tutorials. It is recommended that the lower codemonster be suitable for younger children, and that the use of Codemaven to learn the JavaScript language is based on the interaction with the child and the step-by-step instruction.

Khan Academy contains a computer tutorial, such as a simple programming language, JavaScript, which focuses on painting and is ideal for young children.

stencyl This is a relatively complex tool, and experienced scratch users can take steps to move forward with the help of an adult. You can use stencyl to create a "flash" game for your site that runs on Iphone/ipad and Android devices, which is the main reason for attracting children to create a shared application with friends. Recently, my son began to actively use stencyl, in order to find out this tool, it also took us a lot of time. This tool covers a wide range of user experiences and is simple and practical.

I would encourage my children to use these tools to learn programming knowledge through scratch, such as what loops, variables, etc. These are some of my current ideas and suggestions. Hope that through these small ways to enlighten you, smart devices are not just used to play, for their children cast a dream of development, from this moment to start! (Compile/Xiameng)

English from:ilikecode