Wondrfly’s Guide to Children and Coding
If you’re looking for a fun and engaging activity to boost your child’s cognitive growth, why not try an online coding class for your kid? The internet has a plethora of free online coding classes for kids, and the benefits abound. Preparing your child for an increasingly technologically driven world means preparing your child for a bright future. Check out our guide to helping your child learn coding, complete with free online coding classes for kids you can try at home!
The Benefits of Coding for Children
There are countless benefits to allowing kids to learn coding, from teaching them valuable future workplace skills, to developing their cognitive abilities. Here are some areas that coding can improve in your child:
Math Skills
As kids learn coding, they will encounter challenges which require them to sharpen basic math skills. So, although it doesn’t take a math whiz to learn coding, coding may improve your child’s performance in mathematics in the long run.
Attention to Detail
Code must be error-free to yield results, so kids will learn to carefully inspect their work for mistakes. This will help their academic performance in later life and make them far more efficient written communicators.
Structural Thinking
Structural thinking includes all the cognitive processes in your child’s brain than help them understand how parts come together to constitute a whole, and, vice versa, how to break down a whole into parts. Learning how code is structured isn’t that different from learning parts of speech in a sentence, for example, so the learning strategies your child develops while coding are transferable to anything they might want to learn in the future!
Persistence
Coding can be frustrating at times! If your child overlooks an error, they won’t get the results they want, which can lead to repeated disappointments. But this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The motivation to create a website or game of their own will likely persuade them to keep trying, making the final result all the more satisfying!
Creativity
Kids will love the endless possibilities coding opens for them! They can learn to design their own websites, games, apps, and more.
Possible Pitfalls: How to Prepare your Child for Coding Classes
When introducing your child to coding, you may have some reservations about their sitting at the computer for too long. It’s a good idea to limit the time they can spend coding and have some physical activity in their day to balance their computer time. Also, ensure that they understand and observe the proper posture for typing at a computer, to prevent risk of developing carpal tunnel and other uncomfortable symptoms later in life!
Three Fantastic and Free Online Coding Classes for Kids!
Now that you’ve learned how coding classes can benefit your child, you may be curious about how to get them involved and gauge their interest without a financial investment. Wondrfly is here to help with a list of four fantastic, free, online coding resources, for kids!
Code.org
Code.org offers a variety of resources for kids to learn to code, including videos, games, and self-paced lessons. They have express courses targeted at pre-and post-reading age kids, absolutely free!
Blockly
Blockly was made to allow young children to learn concepts that will prepare them for computer languages and coding. In the eight different games available, kids must connect puzzle pieces that represent lines of code to achieve a desired result. This enhances their structural thinking skills and gets them ready to code. Best of all, it’s free!
Stencyl
Kids interested in gaming and game design will love Stencyl! This app is available for Mac and Windows desktops as well as mobile devices. It allows kids to create basic platform games without code. It’s a great way to gauge a child’s interest in game development and coding by allowing them to create their own games, code free, before learning how to do the real thing. A free version is available, but some features require a subscription.
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