A guide for kids who want to learn coding

Coding is quickly becoming an essential academic skill, right up there with reading, writing, and arithmetic. This book is an ideal way for young learners ages 8-13 who want more coding knowledge than you can learn in an hour, a day, or a week.

Written by a classroom instructor with over a decade of experience teaching technology skills to kids as young as five, this book teaches the steps and logic needed to write code, solve problems, and create fun games and animations using projects based in Scratch and JavaScript. This 2^nd Edition is fully updated to no longer require any limited-time software downloads to complete the projects.

• Learn the unique logic behind writing computer code
• Use simple coding tools
ideal for teaching kids and beginners
• Build games and animations
you can show off to friends
• Add motion and interactivity to your projects

Whether you’re a kid ready to make fun things using technology or a parent, teacher, or mentor looking to introduce coding in an eager child’s life, this fun book makes getting started with coding fun and easy!

Product description

Margaret7
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Excellent book – using free ‘Scratch’ software from the internet.
4 July 2019
Format: eBook Books-for-everyone  Customer Review of Free Product( What’s this? )
This is the second edition of ‘Coding for Kids’ and to work through the exercises in the book your child will need to use ‘Scratch’ – which is free software, developed by MIT for the specific purpose of educating children in computer programming (= coding). So, unlike the first edition, this book is the only financial outlay you need to make – assuming you already have a computer of some kind, and internet access.
The book itself is an excellent example of the quality educational publications from the ‘for dummies’ team. It has been written by a woman who is an expert in both computing and educating children. It treats the reader as an intelligent individual, while writing at a level a child will easily understand. It is clear, warm and approachable. It won’t frighten the less experienced coder, while not patronising, or boring those who are more experienced. There are loads of interesting and confidence-building programmes to learn to write, while at the same time learning a huge amount about how computers and programmes work. It’s brilliant stuff. I can remember when PCs first came out – they didn’t even have an internal hard drive and the operating system was the DOS prompt – and I’ve written programmes in FORTRAN and BASIC, using punch cards (nightmare!) – but this – this is a whole new world, one we could hardly have imagined 40 years ago. Much of the underlying theory is unchanged but programming is so much easier – and it is a brilliant thing to see it as such a normal thing that kids can learn to do it. I am going to love working through this book with my grandchildren!

One person found this helpful

Dave
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Maybe for younger children
7 July 2019
Format: eBook Vine Customer Review of Free Product( What’s this? )
At first, I thought that the Scratch computer language would be pretty limited and no sooner than children learnt to write computer programs in Scratch they would have to look for a more advanced computer language to continue. However, if you look at the MIT site, who developed the Scratch computer language, there are some very advanced applications. So, this book may be a starting point but the would-be programmer, or coder to use the modern word, would be able to go much further with the scratch language. An example on the MIT website was a fully working chess program.

My 6 year old grandson took to this quite quickly when I presented it to him. I think this was mainly due to achieving near instant results just by copying the first few examples in the book with my help. When he saw how easy it was to drag and drop icons of musical instruments onto a digital stage and then assign a sound to that instrument he was well away in experimenting with different sounds for the same instrument and in doing so he was developing a “feel” for the method of dragging and dropping small blocks of code into the work-space.

Overall, I would say that this book could give any child an insight into computer programming but as the stated aim of the book is for 8 to 13-year olds, I wonder if this is compatible with education in schools. The National Curriculum suggests that by key Stage 1, age five to seven, they should have an insight to various things like algorithms, debugging simple programs etc. Maybe this book should be given to younger children

One person found this helpful

Paulbrad
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Great – just buy it!
23 June 2019
Format: eBook Books-for-everyone Customer Review of Free Product ( What’s this? )
If you teach primary school children Computing then get this book – it’s great.
The front cover tells you all you need to know…
– Learn the basics of coding
– Create apps and games
– No experience required
The book is very easy to understand, has better quality paper than previous “dummies” books I have read and contains nicely done colour graphics that help to explain some of the concepts you will learn about.
During the 15 projects you will develop coding skills in three free coding programs – Scratch, App Lab, and MakeCode, the latter two I was unfamiliar with but are easy to pick up.
Older children could work through some of these projects on their own but the real value of this book, in my opinion, is to spark some creativity into Computing lessons, particularly in KS2.
A must buy as a Summer read for classroom practitioners with an interest in working with children to learn how to code in a fun and easy way.
One person found this helpful

Lesley70
4 ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Out Of 5 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Coding for Kids for Dummies – Not Just for Kids
8 September 2019
Format: eBook Vine Customer Review of Free Product ( What’s this? )
I chose this more for myself, as my daughter hasn’t yet started formal computer coding lessons. (She’s at KS1 but they kind of do computer coding without knowing that they’re doing it, so for example they have programmed a robot to do various things such as walk around a maze without falling off the table. So they are learning simple programs and algorithms without knowing that’s what they’re doing). I wanted to have an idea (get a little ahead) of what she would be talking about when she did get further on.

I think this book is a good place to start. It takes you from the basics – Part 1 Getting Started; Part 2 Sounds, Colour, Random Surprises; Part 3 Moving from Here to There, Again and Again – to more complex ideas – Part 4 Variables, Simple Conditionals, and I/O; Part 5 Lists, Loops and Logic. I like the gradual build-up of knowledge – you can start from knowing nothing about computer coding as long as you know how to use your smartphone / tablet / pc. I think it’s extremely well written and also written in an accessible way that isn’t intimidating.

This is a US publication, so the main issue for UK readers of the book (apart from some spelling differences) is highlighted in Part 6 Onwards and Upwards – the further online learning resources, the computer camps and the computer college courses that are suggested are all US based. So this part of the book will be of limited value if you’re in the UK.

Overall excellent resource not only for children but for grown-ups too.