Books and Articles by Camille McCue

Coding, or computer programming, is your way of communicating with technology. It’s the new literacy you need to master to be successful in the coming decades. Like any form of communication, coding takes place through language. Just as there are many human languages (English, French, Mandarin, Spanish, and so on), there are many coding languages!

When coding, it’s important to teach kids the basics of setting and finding position. Setting the position of an object means assigning it coordinates to put it in a specific place onscreen. Finding the position of an object means identifying its coordinates to know where it’s located. Using pseudocode While each programming language uses its own structure for setting and finding coordinates, a typical pseudocode expression you may write to set the position of an object looks like this: setx x-coordinate sety y-coordinate Or setposition (x-coordinate, y-coordinate) To find the current position of an object, you can write pseudocode for each separate coordinate: x-position for the x-coordinate of the object, and y-position for the y-coordinate of the object.

Coding is fast becoming a skill that every child needs to be educated for in the 21st Century. But coding is taught at only a small fraction of schools, and often only at the high school level. Helping kids learn how to code also means you’re assisting them in developing a skill that is highly marketable and sets them apart from peers at school and later, in their careers.

Kids need to learn how to code all of the basics. Searching through lists is a very important task that you and your coder might want to have your program accomplish. Linear versus binary searching algorithms When it comes to lists, linear search is pretty straightforward. Essentially you start at the beginning of the list, and check to see if the first item is the item you’re looking for.

Teaching kids how to add sound to programs really brings them to life. Just a fair warning, after you teach your young coder how to add sounds, he may never want to stop playing the silly fart noise that he found! It might be helpful to have headphones, especially if you’re leading a group of young coders. Sound file types Just like with images, sound files are broken into three categories; uncompressed, lossless compression, and compressed (lossy compressed).

Your young coder can write code that changes the value of a variable under certain conditions as the program executes. A common way to change a variable value is to increment it. To increment a variable means to increase it by the same amount at each change. For example, your coder may increment a scoring variable by +2 each time a basketball goal is made.

One useful operator that can be tricky for young coders at first is modulo, also referred to as modulus and mod. The mod of two numbers is the remainder after a division of two numbers.This operator can be useful for writing applications based on real-world scenarios. For example, say you have $20.00. You want to pass out exactly $3.