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Coding Games - Why?
Many of you may have visited coding sites such as code.org and seen the myriads of games kids can enjoy while learning to code.
If you have played those games, you may have had the same questions I had – how does this relate to programming and how does it help my kids?
After playing a few of the games on code.org myself, I have to admit, it was getting a little bit boring and even my daughter has lost interest. For the games suitable for her age (Elementary School), it was a lot of repeating of getting a character from one end to another. WHY?
After doing some research – it seemed a lot of the coding courses start off that way. It is not necessarily teaching the kids (or you) the specific computer languages, but teaching you how to put together instructions for the computer to follow in order to achieve a certain objective. This is also known as “algorithm.”
By giving kids their favorite character (such as an angry bird or Frankie from Monster High), it keeps them engaged on trying to reach the objective. Since kids at the elementary school age can easily relate to instruction someone to reach a certain destination, the best way to train them in deriving algorithms is by asking them to put together block (of hidden codes) that asks the character to go up, down, left, right.
By practicing over and over these instructions, and adding additional blocks, kids are first exposed to sequential instructions, followed by thinking in terms of loops, and also conditional instructions (such as “if,” “else if,” and “else”).
The main concept of these coding game is trying to teach kids how to problem solve without knowing a specific computer language. They are trained in coming up with the algorithm which in the future can then be used in developing games and applications.
One thing I did to resolve the issue of my daughter losing interest in the coding games is to advance to higher and more difficult rounds with her (with concepts such as looping and if/then), and work with her first to solve a couple of the puzzle, then challenging her on a match as to who can solve the puzzle first.
Cutting back some of the "practicing" time may also help reduce the inertia, but it is important to consistently practice and train the minds of our little innovators.
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