It is not an easy task to teach kids and adults about programming. Imagine the challenge when it comes to teaching adults. It is not an impossible goal, but a program for adults does need good structure and design.
When it comes to teaching kids how to program, you must consider two important things. First, you must keep it fun. If it’s not fun, kids will hate the process and become bored very quickly. Once an educational tool has lost a child’s interest, it has lost its ability to teach. Second, you must assess the child’s skill development constantly. This is not an easy task. The assessment must come with prizes for doing well.
In most cases when educational tools fail, it is either because the material gets too hard for the students or they don’t want to do it anymore or because the material is not hard enough and students grow bored. When it comes to early stage learning, proper assessment is the best way to monitor a child’s skill level and to keep them engaged in the learning process. Most coding education tools available today lack a proper assessment module.
RoboGarden has given great attention to this part of their curriculum. With its intelligent hinting system and infinite number of trials, RoboGarden helps students progress on their own without handing them the correct answer or leaving them stuck with no hints.
Programming can be taught in many ways. Blockly is a programming language that makes use of interlocking building blocks and uses a visual editor to become kid-friendly. The process of learning to code with Blockly is fun. In fact, as you link blocks together, you can run the code and see how it will command Robo, RoboGarden’s hero robot, to achieve his current mission. This adds tons of fun to the programming experience, which is no longer limited to just lines of code that cannot be executed until all errors are eliminated. This makes RoboGarden an ideal means of teaching code to a wide range of ages, including older kids and adults who may not appreciate the cartoons other platforms use to appeal to a younger audience.
You can just jump right into coding with Python and JavaScript, but the smooth transition RoboGarden provides with an introduction in Blockly. As you become more familiar with coding context, the Blockly blocks eventually give way to Python or JavaScript code. You will find yourself coding in one of the two languages, or perhaps even both, sooner than you think. With an easy point of entry into the scripting languages.
You can experience all of this today. Try RoboGarden now.
