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Sunday, December 7, 2014

Teach Your Preschooler to Write Computer Code

This is my daughter (age 3/12) learning to write computer code. Let me preface this by saying I know almost nothing about coding. I, myself, have only been learning it for a couple of days.

Next week, the public school where I teach is participating in The Hour of Code, which encourages teachers to teach students how to write computer code for one hour. Because my school has an iPad lab, I was able to take my students into it twice last week to "play" Code With Anna and Elsa (from Frozen). There are 20 "puzzles" in which the "player" uses Blockly (a programming language) to write code for Anna and Elsa to ice skate. It's so so fun. Just try it. You'll see.

So, on Day 2, because I had completed Code With Anna and Elsa, I tried my hand (or hands) at Plants Versus Zombies (who comes up with this stuff?), and I saw that the website had a tutorial for pre-readers. That evening, I came home and started teaching my daughter how to drag and click Blockly blocks.

She wrote 48 lines of code before dinner.

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