Helping Kids with Coding For Dummies

Chapter 18

Ten Ways to Keep the Coding Learning Going

Though your goal might be to keep your young coder engaged in coding for years to come, it’s important to recognize that to do that, it might mean encouraging young coders to see how newly developed skills fit into the rest of their lives. In this chapter, you find tips for keeping the spark of curiosity and creativity alive with your young coder, sometimes by not coding at all!

Unplugged

As you find throughout this book, unplugged activities are great ways to introduce coding concepts to young coders without the need of a computer at all. The benefit of unplugged activities is that you can encourage your young coder to take a step back and really understand a concept well. Unplugged activities can also be done in groups and a lot of them can be done anywhere, even on a long road trip! You can find unplugged activities in a few places, but the two most popular sites are CSUnplugged and Code.Org’s unplugged page.

On CSUnplugged (csunplugged.com) you find an entire book available for download or hard copy in English, with some chapters downloadable in over 20 other languages. In addition to the book, activities are targeted for ages 5-12 on a variety of topics such as data representation, algorithms, and cryptography. Most activities are truly unplugged and have simple PDFs that can be downloaded and printed, and CSUnplugged has created a number of videos to support the learning of these concepts as well.

On Code.Org’s unplugged ...