The Basics of Programming: 5 Handy Tools and Resources to Use for Teaching Kids

In this day and age, gadgets like computers, smartphones and tablets have become a vital part of our lives. Even the young ones pick up an iPhone to kill boredom or to Google stuff for their homework and school projects. With kids becoming more tech-savvy as time goes by, there’s no reason they can’t learn the basics behind their favorite technology. Yes, we’re saying there’s no reason you can’t teach your kids programming at a young age!

Teaching kids the basics of programming will not only develop their analytic programming skills at an early age but will also help them get an idea what they want to become in the future, say, a programmer or web developer.

To help you out, here are 5 of the best educational tools and resources that you can use to teach kids the basics of programming and to help develop their skills. Most of them are based on a visual programming language, with a drag-and-drop interface for programming. These colorful and highly engaging tools will surely help build up your child’s programming skills.

Enjoy!

Tynker

Tyker is a handy online programming learning system that’s especially designed to help and motivate kids to translate their creative ideas into games, projects and animated stories, and circulate their apps on the Web. This platform makes use of easy-to-understand visual programming language where no programming syntax is required; only blocks of codes that are combined together to create programs.

Tynker offers a fee for lifetime access, but they offer online self-paced courses, mobile puzzles, as well as summer camps.

Scratch

This popular programming language and online community is developed and maintained by the Lifelong Kindergarten group of MIT Media Lab. It’s a freely available service and it allows the young ones to create their own animations, games, and stories. With this, your kids can share their creative works to the whole world using this website’s online community.

Hopscotch

Hopscotch comes on the premise that programming is designed for everyone. By using this platform, you can easily teach the fundamentals of programming to your kids. At present, you can only download the Hopscotch app for free on the iPad. It allows your kids to develop their own animations, stories, games, and many other interactive programs by dragging and dropping blocks of code. You can shake, tilt or even shout at the iPad to control the characters in the program. Have your kids try it out today!

Hackety Hack

This user-friendly programming tool can be used to teach the basics of programming to your kids. You don’t need to have any prior knowledge or experience in programming before you start working on this program. It’s based on the Ruby programming language that’s used for the development of programs like desktop apps and websites. With this program, it’s a breeze to build graphical interfaces using the in-built Shoes tool.

RoboMind

RoboMind is a programming tool for kids. The program uses its own language called ROBO. It’s a simple language that doesn’t require any previous knowledge in programming. The main objective of this programming tool is to move a virtual robot on a two-dimensional grid and perform simple tasks. By using this tool, your young ones can learn the basics of artificial intelligence and later on, even use it on real robotic kits like LEGO Mindstorms NXT 2.0.

RoboMind offers a free 30-day trial to use their tools.