10 tools to teach kids the basics of programming (Part 1)

Ngoc Huynh

We are living in a digital era where gadgets from computers, smartphones to tablets have become an essential part of our lives. Even kids these days pick up an iPad as and figure out apps like how a fish takes to water. With kids becoming more tech-savvy as time goes on, there’s no reason why they can’t learn the basics behind their favorite technology. That’s right, we’re saying that there’s no reason why you can’t teach your kids programming from a young age.

This will not only develop the analytical programming skills of kids at early age but will also help them get an idea that whether they want to become a programmer in future. Here we’ve put together for you 10 educational tools that can be used to teach and develop programing skills in kids. Most of the listed tools are based on a visual programming language which has drag and drop interface for programming. These colorful and engaging tools will ultimately help build up your childs programming skills.

Hopscotch

Hopscotch says that programming is designed for everyone. By using Hopscotch, you can teach the basics of programming to your kid easily. Currently, you can only download the Hopscotch app for free on the iPad. Hopscotch allows your kids to develop their own games, stories, animations and other many interactive programs by dragging and dropping blocks of code. One can shake, tilt or even shout at the iPad to control the characters in program.

Scratch

Scratch is a programing language and online community, which is developed and maintained by Lifelong Kindergarten group at MIT Media Lab. Scratch is a free to use service and it allows your kids to create their own animations, games and stories. Your kids can share their creations with others around the world using the online community of Scratch.

Alice

Alice is a free to use 3D programming tool that allows one to create animations for telling a story, playing an interactive or a video to share on the web. The main purpose of Alice is to give your kids basic exposure to object-oriented programming. By using Alice, students will learn to create animated movies (containing people, animals and vehicles) and simple video games.

Tynker

Tynker is an online programming learning system designed to motivate kids to translate their creative ideas into games, projects and animated stories, and circulate their apps on the web. Tynker uses easy visual programming language in which no programming syntax is required but only blocks of codes are combined together to create programs. There’s a fee for lifetime access but they offer online self-paced courses, mobile puzzles and summer camps as well.

Hackety Hack

Hackety Hack is an easy to use programming tool which can be used to teach the absolute basics of programming. One doesn’t need any prior experience of programming before they start working on Hackety Hack. It is based on Ruby programming language. Ruby is used for development of programs such as desktop applications and websites. It is really easy to build graphical interfaces using the Shoes tool of Hackety Hack.

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