Teaching my kids to code – any resources or suggestions for leveling up?
Hi Everyone,
I have two kids (ages 11 and 8) that have been coding on Scratch for a few years now. They love it and are quite proficient and have built a lot of great stuff over the years. They love building games and the Scratch community for the most part has been great.
However, I'd like to "level up" their coding. Scratch is good as an introduction, but it has a lot of limitations (e.g. lists/arrays can only be one dimensional and contain only strings/numbers, there are no objects, coding interactions between sprites and sprite clones are hacky) and in many cases, Scratch results in poor coding habits (being able to put your code anywhere on results in truly terrible, hard-to-debug spaghetti code).
My kids love making games, so I tried a Unity and a Godot tutorial with them, but that was clearly too complicated and a step too far. Learning a fully-featured game engine and how to do text-based coding (rather than block-based) at the same time was too much.
So my current plan is to teach them how to make some games in JavaScript – first text-based games in the terminal using Node.js, then in the browser with HTML/CSS, but I haven't found a lot of good or substantial resources for this age. I'm just making stuff up and googling project ideas for kids as I go along.
Does anyone have any suggestions on ideas, resources, game-making platforms/frameworks for kids to level up their coding? Thanks!
On a totally separate note, I'd like to share a quick story that parents might find amusing. My two kids are really kind souls but sometimes get into sibling-rivalry fights as kids normally do. Once their squabble made its way onto the Scratch platform. My older kid called the other a "weirdo" in the comments of the other's project (apparently that's the best insult she could come up with), and the younger got mad and reported the incident.
I don't know who the Scratch moderators are – I'm guessing they are volunteers who probably don't know any better – but they decided to ban both my kids for violating the Scratch community guidelines AND put an IP block on my household so no one could use Scratch. Having this happen right in the middle of Covid-19 was really frustrating. The younger child emailed Scratch help because he didn't understand why he couldn't log in to which they replied that he was in "detention". He had no idea what detention even was.
When I emailed them to sort out the situation, it took about 2 months of back and forth (it took about 2-3 weeks for them to respond to each email I sent) until they finally unbanned my kids and household. Crazy!
But it was a great lesson for my kids about the risks of platform dependency – when you build on someone else's platform, you always have some risk that they might pull the rug out from under you 🙂
I like Tree House - they would be good for middle school or late elementary start?
Thanks for the recommendation. I've heard of treehouse but I thought it was more for adults than kids. I'll check it out though.
Khan Academy has some great resources that my kids love.
https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/computer-programming
Thanks for the recommendation @Betilfan, I'll check it out with my kids!