Kids coding languages

A kids programming language aka kids coding languages

Back in the 1940s, while he was also otherwise occupied helping The Allies win the Second World War, an Englishman by the name of Alan Turing had, what was at the time, a revolutionary idea about how machines might work in the future. Until Mr. Turing cam along a machine was designed, built and used to serve one purpose only. Turing’s revolutionary idea was to build machines that could be programmed and programmed again and again to do all manner of different tasks. At the time the name given to workers whose primary function was the repeated application of calculations or processes to produce high volumes of outputs was a “computer”. Turing’s groundbreaking paper, “”On Computable Numbers..” derived some context from these computers and it is from this origin we get the term computer programming, or as the cool kids call it, computer coding.

When we’ve discussed Coding for Kids in the past we are often asked “what sorts of kids coding languages do you use”. The short answer is that there is no such thing as an “kids programming language” or “kids coding languages” as they are otherwise described. All programming languages are designed and intended for serious uses and to date there has never been a programming language designed specifically for children. The term “kids coding language” has however begun to be used to broadly define the level of complexity that should be taught to children.

At Coding for Kids we use the term to define the level of knowledge our students will get out of our courses, implying that after our courses the student will still have lots of opportunities to continue developing their coding skills.

Computer programming at Coding for Kids

At Coding for Kids we teach our students how to start coding with their computer preinstalled with a linux based operating system. The particular variant we have decided to install is called Raspbian which comes preloaded with a programming language called Python, the official programming language of the Raspberry Pi. Our initial course starts by introducing students to both the Raspbian operating system as well as the Python programming language that they will learn.

Raspbian also comes packaged with a number of other popular computer programming languages such as HTML5, JavaScript, JQuery, Java and C++. So depending on which course a student is doing there will always be the resources available to help them continue to learn programming at ever more complex levels.