You would like your child to learn how to write code, but as a homeschool parent who has no background in computing, you are just not sure you can handle adding it to your homeschool curriculum. Now here’s where the blessing of the age, the internet, comes in. You don’t have to be an expert coder to be able to teach your homeschool child the basics of coding. You don’t even have to teach them anything on your own.
Young children can be taught to think in terms of breaking up steps to do simple tasks before they ever write a line of code. This is called sequencing in coding and allows the programmer clarity in the steps that will need to be done to accomplish a specific action. This can be made more challenging once they master the basics. Within a sequence you can ask the child to add a loop, which is essentially performing a fixed set of steps in a given order till a specific task is completed.
Once you have them thinking in steps, you can ask them to put it down in flowcharts. This is simple enough for anyone to pick up and drawing and colouring the different boxes of the flowchart is fun for all homeschooling children. Besides it gets them thinking in an organized manner. Using sequential puzzles will also strengthen this skill. Now you can move them on to gaming apps which allow them to pick and choose elements. Here they begin to understand how they can add or take away from the game environment to make it easier or tougher.
Eventually lead them on to visual programming languages that have been developed for young children. These may not involve writing actual code, but a great many other features are involved in making the learning fun. Plus its a great first step to actual code writing. A great one to start with is Scratch, a visual programming language developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Scratch works well for children older than 8 years, and there is even a Scratch Jr version which can be used by children as young as 5 years.
