Camille McCue Ph.D - Helping Kids with Coding For Dummies

Helping Kids with Coding For Dummies

Published by: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774, www.wiley.com

Copyright 2018 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey

Published simultaneously in Canada

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2018935055

ISBN 978-1-119-38067-2 (pbk); ISBN 978-1-119-38066-5 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-119-38058-0 (ebk)

Welcome to the world of computer programming! Whether youre an expert at programming or youve never written a line of code in your life, you can coach young people in learning the basics of coding. Just like learning to read, cook, or drive, basic principles define the discipline of coding, and the broader discipline from which coding is derived: computer science. This book coaches you step-by-step through the concepts and commands you need to help the kids in your life learn to program!

Coding is fast becoming a skill that every child needs to be educated for in the 21st Century. Knowing how to code means possessing a skill that allows the children youre coaching to create things that are highly useful in modern society apps, websites, analysis tools, and more. Helping kids learn how to code also means youre assisting them in developing a skill that is highly marketable and sets them apart from peers at school and later, in their careers.

But coding is taught at only a small fraction of schools, and often only at the high school level. This book offers you an easy-to-understand, but comprehensive, overview of all the coding fundamentals you need to teach. We largely avoid a theoretical approach to the material, instead offering you hands-on, practical content and methods of instructing your kids in coding. Like content in all For Dummies titles, this book is clear, concise, and organized in an easy-access format.

Helping Kids with Coding For Dummies is structured in a progressive sequence, with introductory topics preceding more challenging topics. The book builds in complexity, but you can dive straight in to any chapter, to discover more about that topic at any time. You already know about variables but need a bit of guidance in assisting your kid with loops? Then head straight to for help.

As you explore each chapter, keep in mind the following structure:

• Each chapter begins with hands-on, away-from-computer activities. These games and act-it-out skits get you and your coders thinking about the big ideas before you dive into the code.
• Each chapter has guidance in writing code snippets in pseudocode, followed by many popular programming languages. Pseudocode is literally fake code that stands in conceptually for real code but doesnt really run on a computer.
• Each chapter ends with a small project that features the theme of the chapter. Projects are written in a variety of languages, but you can adapt them to any language in which you want to write them. You dont need to buy any software to use the featured programming languages.
• Programming code is shown in monofont.
• Command sequences using onscreen menus use the command arrow. For example, when working in Scratch, you can open a new project as follows: From the menu bar, choose FileNew.

In this book, we make some assumptions (possibly foolish assumptions!) regarding you getting started in your role as a coding coach:

• You are a parent, a teacher, an after-school guide, a summer mentor, a tutor, a coach, or other guide who is interested in helping youth learn to code.
• You have patience, a sense of humor, or both! Learning coding yourself and helping young coders develop and improve their own skills requires some of these.

Weve also made some assumptions with regard to the coding work youll be doing:

• You possess at least a little experience in typing on a computer keyboard, navigating a computer interface, and using a trackpad or mouse. Your background may be in using a Windows-based PC, a Macintosh, or both.
• Youre capable of using a web browser such as Safari, Chrome, or Firefox, and you can type a URL to access a website such as Scratch.com and Code.org.