How to Introduce a Child to Programming Without a Computer
If you’re looking to teach your child to program, there is certainly no shortage of apps, iPad-connected toys, motorized kits, and programmable pets that you can buy for your future Google employee. Some of them are no doubt good, but many focus on specific skills that may or may not be relevant in the coming decades. For young children, more important than learning to code may be the ability to think like a programmer . And for this they don’t even need a computer.
Here are some ways to introduce your kids to programming concepts using simple materials that you probably already have at home.
Throw a dance party
To introduce your children to the concept of a loop (essentially a sequence), turn on the music and ask them to repeat a series of dance moves. Here is a simple task from the book “Helping Children with Programming for Dummies” :
Identify five dance moves: clap, stomp, swing, jump, and squat. Then write a series of moves in one line on the whiteboard (or even on a piece of paper):
Repeat 2 times: clap, clap, clap Repeat 3 times: stomp, stomp, clap, wiggle, jump, squat, jump, clap
After learning the sequence, your young coders can write their own dance loop using the same steps and ask you to do it.
Get beading
If you have multiple black and white beads (or any two colors), you can introduce your child to binary code – a way of representing information using only two options – by making bracelets with binary code. Take a string, print out the binary alphabet and assign 1 to black and 0 to white. Then start embroidering with beads. My initials MW will be encoded as 0100110101010111.
Play with paper dolls
HelloRuby.com , the online resource for Linda Lucas’s quirky ” Hello Ruby” book series, offers several creative activities to teach kids computers, coding, and technology. I love Lucas’ idea of using paper dolls to familiarize yourself with the concepts of boolean expressions (a logical statement that can be true or false) and choice. In this activity, the children dress Ruby in different clothes and accessories using booleans such as “Ruby wears green and red clothes on Mondays” and choice statements such as “If it rains, Ruby wears [ point to the correct clothes ] or otherwise. she is wearing [ point to correct clothes ]. “
Stack of cups
To teach your kids the connection between symbols and actions, you can ask them to become a cup-folding robot – an idea fromThinkersmith . First, create the code using these symbols, and then have your little “robot” follow the code. Then switch.
You can watch for irregular movements and then work together to “debug” the program.