About a month ago, I launched the Young Coder publication at Medium to cover the field of kid coding and STEM education. Young Coder isn’t mature yet, but it’s slowly growing up.
Recently we published a couple of stories about alternative approaches to teaching computer programming. If you’re tired of Scratch and coding games, you might want to consider these ideas:
- Travel back to the past. Gerald Friedland explains how you can use a free emulator to provide a retro Commodore computing environment, complete with BASIC. And the old magic still works for young children.
- Invite kids to create interactive stories. Kicks Condor explains how kids can use programming features like variables and conditional logic in Twine, the choose-your-own-adventure style story telling framework.
We’ve also published a round-up of basic HTML editors and a quick-and-dirty mistake-spotting exercise for HTML newbies. In the future, Young Coder will add more exercises and practical content. Feel free to let us know what you’d like to see by emailing yc @ prosetech.com.
And if you’re an educator teaching code, or a parent trying the latest STEM toy or learn-to-code app with your kids, drop us a line. We’re planning to gradually open the doors at Young Coder to more contributors, so stay tuned!