Now Is the Time to Teach Your Kids to Code

Spend a weekend — or a monthlong at-home break — giving your kids a taste of programming

Matthew MacDonald
OneZero

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Photo: Sally Anscombe/Getty Images

IfIf you’re like millions of parents across the world, you’ve suddenly crashed into an unplanned at-home break with your kids. Many of the usual options for educational enrichment — museums, galleries, concerts — are shuttered. Helpful distractions like parks and playdates have been swallowed up by new rules of social distancing. And the odds are good that you’ll need to balance the chaos at home with the ongoing remote work requirements of your own job.

Here’s the good news: There is a way to keep your kids busy and help them learn something truly useful. Best of all, they can stay in their pajamas while they do it (pending parent approval, of course).

The answer is learning to code.

How to find good learn-to-code activities

In the past decade, the world has gone crazy for code-themed education. There’s an iPad app or battery-devouring robot caterpillar for every age. Many of these toys and games are perfectly fun activities that do very little to teach actual computer science concepts. To be kind, they overpromise. (To be less kind, their claims are bunk.)

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Matthew MacDonald
OneZero

Teacher, coder, long-ago Microsoft MVP. Author of heavy books. Join Young Coder for a creative take on science and technology. Queries: matthew@prosetech.com