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Coding Books
Camille McCue
Sarah Guthals
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Published:
May 8, 2018

Helping Kids with Coding For Dummies

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Overview

Help for grown-ups new to coding

Getting a jump on learning how coding makes technology work is essential to prepare kids for the future. Unfortunately, many parents, teachers, and mentors didn't learn the unique logic and language of coding in school. Helping Kids with Coding For Dummies comes to the rescue. It breaks beginning coding into easy-to-understand language so you can help a child with coding homework, supplement an existing coding curriculum, or have fun learning with your favorite kid.

The demand to have younger students learn coding has increased in recent years

as the demand for trained coders has far exceeded the supply of coders. Luckily, this fun and accessible book makes it a snap to learn the skills necessary to help youngsters develop into proud, capable coders!

  • Help with coding homework or enhance a coding curriculum
  • Get familiar with coding logic and how to de-bug programs
  • Complete small projects as you learn coding language
  • Apply math skills to coding

If you’re a parent, teacher, or mentor eager to help 8 to 14 year olds learn to speak a coding language like a mini pro, this book makes it possible!

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About The Author

Camille McCue, PhD, is Director of Curriculum Innovations at the Adelson Educational Campus in Las Vegas where she leads the Startup Incubator, teaches STEM, and kickstarts K-12 learning initiatives. Sarah Guthals, PhD, co-founded an ed-tech company and now continues to build technology for kids to learn, create, and share safely online. She loves to teach teachers how to teach coding in the classroom.

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helping kids with coding for dummies

CHEAT SHEET

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.
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There are so many ways to invest in your young coders coding future. Though a computer with an Internet connection and time and dedication are some of the best ways to invest, this list gives an overview of some of the ways parents we know have dedicated time or money to support their children in their coding adventures.
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The really neat thing about learning to code is that you can literally apply it to pretty much any other passion in life, and any other field. Our biggest piece of advice for coders in high school and college who are considering computer science as their career path is to first choose a passion outside of coding, and then figure out a way to apply coding to that passion.
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As a summary from the book, here are some ideas for programs you and your young coder can write, separated by programming language. Although these are the ones presented in this book, you can also imagine creating almost any of these in the other languages too. When in doubt, search the Internet for examples of programs you want to build in the languages you want to build them in—luckily there is almost always a near-example that can help guide you!
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Getting started with coding can be accomplished as early as age four or five, even before a child can read! Programming languages that use symbols, instead of words, can be especially helpful in coaching young children to build fundamental programming concepts. The Foos The Foos is a free, fun, and instructionally excellent coding game for tots.
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After your child begins reading code, the door opens for additional programming languages and environments. Even the most basic of reading skills affords your beginner coder the ability to recognize code-based tiles, as well as type a few commands in text-based languages that require use of a QWERTY keyboard.As your young coder progresses into her tweens (pre-teen years), she can type more content to create longer programs in a text-based environment, as well as follow along with written tutorials that accompany some offerings.
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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).
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It’s easy for kids to make semantic errors when they’re first learning to code. Unlike syntax errors, semantic errors are often more difficult to capture. This is because semantic errors are typically errors in the programming logic, rather than something that you typed incorrectly. Here, you find a couple of examples of semantic errors that you and your young coder might encounter in a few different programming languages.
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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.
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After you and your young coder finish making your app, you can share it with anyone who has an Android device. Just go to your list of Projects (Projects  →   My Projects), check the box next to the app you want to publish, and click Publish to Gallery. The view from the Projects list to publish your app to the Gallery.
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Too many times, people dive into a project by focusing on the details before mapping out the big picture. Coding is no different. It’s helpful for kids to take a step back and see the whole picture before diving into coding. Thinking about coding in terms of typing commands on a computer without stepping back to consider the big picture of what you want the program to do is a recipe for disaster.
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Infrastructure is something adults hear a lot in the grown-up world. It also plays a significant role in coding. Infrastructure is the physical plan of the world. It consists of the same components in any city on earth: roads, water pipes, electricity grids, and other items that give structure and organization to designed human habitats.
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Nested loops can seem complicated to young coders, but they are basically a loop within a loop. This can be useful for making drawings like fractals or fun shapes that repeat but slightly change each time, creating ASCII art, or even having complex repetitions. The examples found here show how nesting loops can help create some fun programs.
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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.
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When we were growing up, there weren’t as many applications and languages targeting novices. Logo and Basic were the main choices! Luckily, in the past decade, programmers and educators from around the world have developed so many languages and environments for coders of all ages and levels of expertise! This is a short list of programming languages, applications, and environments by age.
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After you and your young coder have a handle on the different math operations that are available to you in coding, it can be really fun to find ways to create fun programs that use those operations! One that doesn’t always come to mind is making a cipher! Ciphers are a lot of fun to build because they can offer additional play outside of building the program — you and your coder can write letters to each other using the secret code that only the cipher you built can solve!
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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.
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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.
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One of the most basic tasks you can teach kids to code is making an object move. An object moves when it changes position over time. You can program an object to move in your program using a few different commands. Using pseudocode to make an object move Each programming language uses its own special command to move an object, and you can write different pseudocode expressions to represent the process of moving an object onscreen.
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When you and your young coder are trying to debug, sometimes no error messages give you insight into the problem. Here, you find a list of strategies for debugging programs where you don’t get an error message, or the error message doesn’t give you enough information. Turning sections on and off One of the best ways to debug is to disable sections of code so that you have small sections to test.
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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 <em>x-coordinate</em> sety <em>y-coordinate</em> Or setposition <em>(x-coordinate, y-coordinate)</em> 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.
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As your young coder constructs his programs, he uses logic operations to make decisions about which code needs to execute, and under which conditions. The if-then statements he wants to construct may need to consist of more than one condition — they may need compound (multiple) conditions to execute the consequence.
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Your coder can provide flexibility to her programs by coding parameters to subprograms. For example, coding a square subprogram allows the program to draw a square of a defined size each time the subprogram is called. But what if you want the square subprogram to draw squares of differing sizes? By adding a parameter to the subprogram you can do just that.
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If your young coder wants to try apps, give the MIT App Inventor a try. To get started with MIT App Inventor, you need a Google account. Then follow these steps to set up your programming environment: Go to MIT App Inventor and click Create Apps in the top-right corner of the webpage. Sign in with your Google account.
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Kids have started to jump on the coding bandwagon. Why, you ask? Take literacy, for example. Literacy has been a societal goal for centuries, with conscientious parents and teachers working to ensure that the children in their charge learn the skills necessary to succeed in their careers and in life. Until the 1970s, literacy meant mastering the traditional three “R’s” of “reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmetic” (spelling was considered less necessary).
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