Calling all parents, grandparents, aunties & uncles! We have a couple of hours worth of free entry-level learning courses where you can introduce the kids in your life to coding. Work with them to make the tigers roar or the piano play in our SoundBoard LiveCode learning courses…
During these times maybe you are searching for educational ways to keep your kids entertained, or ideas to stay connected with your grandkids or nieces and nephews remotely. We’ve got something that can help.
The Courses
Let me tell you a little bit about the courses. Let’s start with the Jungle SoundBoard.
Build a beautiful Jungle UI with buttons disguised as Tigers, Monkeys, and Elephants, add a little bit of code and you will be able to hear the animal noises when you click them!
Moving on to building a Piano…
Again we will start with building the UI which takes shape as the keys of the piano. Connect each key to the correct note by adding some code and play us a tune on your custom made piano!
The course also puts forward some further challenges for you to create your own soundboard or it even walks you through adding animation to your Jungle UI.
At the end of the course, you can pick up your Certificate of Completion presented by Code.org – Simply enter your name and print the certificate.
Coding Together
The course was designed for children aged 14+ however I thought I would give it a go last weekend with my two nieces, Hannah who is 11, and doing a bit of Scratch at school and Charlotte aged 9. With a little bit of help from their mum and minimal help from me when they got a bit stuck they got the tiger roaring! They had fun and Hannah, the 11-year-old even said this was easier than the scratch project she had for school.
They got to experience a little bit of what I am sure all developers have experienced at some point, the part when you click the button expecting it to do something and nothing happens, and then the challenge of finding out why. This gave me the opportunity to spend a bit more time with them by jumping on a zoom call from time to time. They would share their screen and I would try to guide them towards finding the little errors they might have made along the way and trying to help them understand why that might have happened.
I asked them both what their favorite thing about it was and these were the answers I got…
Charlotte aged 9 – “I liked it because I really like animals and it made me think really hard.”
Hannah aged 11 – “I liked making something that I could see work. I would go grrr when we thought we had it right but it never made a sound. We cheered really loudly when the tiger eventually roared!”
Since then they have gone on to build the Piano soundboard successfully and are on their way to claiming their certificates.
So parents, grandparents, aunties & uncles, why not introduce your kids to coding and spend a few hours together solving the challenges of making the tiger roar or the piano play. You may end up just providing a couple of hours of welcome entertainment but you may also provide that spark of magic that unlocks their interest in making more cool things with code. You might even learn a thing or two yourself!
Have fun, stay safe.
This learning course is just one way LiveCode is helping people staying at home due to Covid-19. Learn what else we are doing here.
Join the conversation