Teaching Coding in Your Homeschool with CodaKid

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Teaching Coding in Your Homeschool with CodaKid

Have you thought about teaching coding in your homeschool but didn’t know where to start? There are tons of programs and books, but it can feel overwhelming if you don’t know what coding is or how to code. That is why I am so excited to share how CodaKid has helped me teach coding in our homeschool. Before we begin, please take a moment to pin this post to your homeschool board.

Benefits of Coding

Coding is an essential skill in today’s world. That is why it is necessary to teach our kids. It is a skill that our kids will use to create, innovate, and build in the future. However, coding has benefits that go beyond future career opportunities. Coding offers a way for children to learn how to think critically and creatively. They also get to know how to solve problems in a fun and interactive way, all while helping them become more confident in their abilities.

Benefits of Teaching Coding in Your Homeschool:

• Goal Setting: Coding can help your child begin to set goals. They can choose a project or idea that they are going to work on and break it down by steps and work on it, until it is complete.
• Critical and Logical Thinking: Coding is an art but it also involves tons of math. Kids have to be able to understand abstract concepts and apply them logically to real world situations.
• Creativity: Coding involves a lot of creativity and exploration. It all begins with an idea and then doing them from scratch or reverse engineering things to figure out how it all works.
• Problem Solving: Coding isn’t something you do without coming across a problem or two. This gives kids the opportunity to problem solve. Review they work, try again, and come up with a solution.
• Perseverance: When problems occur your kids are more likely to try to figure out the issue instead of neglecting the project. They will keep pushing forward despite setbacks. They will try numerous times to get their project to work.
• Planning and Strategizing: You may not realize it but planning and strategizing are a huge part of coding, your kids will have to plan out and come up with a strategy for their coding projects.
• Confidence: All of these skills will help your child build confidence, when you keep trying something and finally get it to work there is no one that can deny that you feel proud and confident. You have accomplished your goal.

As you can see, coding is much more than the leading career for the next generation. It is an essential subject in today’s world that will help your children develop much-needed life skills.

How To Teach Coding in Your Homeschool

Now that we know why coding is so necessary to teach our children and how it goes beyond the screen to teach life skills let’s figure out how we can teach coding in our homeschool. Recently, we began using a program called CodaKid in our homeschool. My son has been interested in coding for a while, but teaching him even on the fundamental level was challenging. That was until we started using CodaKid.

What is CodaKid?

CodaKid is an online platform that offers a variety of online courses that teach children coding by integrating coding with game design. They offer a variety of classes that teach children popular, real-life programming languages, such as block coding with Scratch, Python, JavaScript, C#, and more by integrating them into activities kids tend to enjoy, such as video games, robotics, and apps. CodaKid offers both self-paced and private 1-on-1 lessons.

These lessons cover over seven hundred hours of everything from block coding with Scratch to Mod Creation with Minecraft. They also offer 10 Game Programing Courses, Roblox Coding Courses, and an additional 4 Specialty Coding Courses.

Self-Paced Vs. Private Lessons

Self-Paced Courses are great for students who problem-solve independently and learn well from video. There are currently 72 courses, 300 quests, and 750 challenges, with new classes added frequently!

1-on-1 Private Tutoring is the fastest way to learn and best for students who work best with structure and accountability. This option offers online live instruction from USA-based instructors from universities such as Standford, MIT, Brown, and Cornell.

What Age Group is CodaKid Meant For?

CodaKid is aimed at children seven years and up. They cover beginning coding up to advanced coding. Courses beginning for block coding with Scratch are offered to ages seven and up, and the program my son focused on as a newbie coder.

What Do I Need For CodaKid

You’ll need a high-speed internet connection and about 4GB of RAM. It shouldn’t be too much of a hassle hardware-wise for most families. Video tutorials are available on mobile devices, but most of the work is still done on a computer, so mobile learning is somewhat limited. You can test your internet speed here

Learning With CodaKid

Since my son is eight years old, I did sit alongside him while he worked. First, he completed the getting started video series, which you may want to skip, but they are beneficial to understanding setup and how the courses work. They clue you into when to pause the video to go work on the code yourself.

AJ began with learning block coding with Scratch. He had to set up an account and immediately started learning about everything you can do on it, experimenting with images, sound, and animation.

He learned the difference between a vector image and a bitmap image from the beginning. Many shapes create a vector image. It has layers and can be manipulated. A bitmap is a flat image created by pixels and can not be manipulated as well as vectors.

How Does CodaKid Teach Coding?

Lessons are in video format with fun, lively and knowledgeable instructors. The video tutorials are narrated a lot like YouTube-style videos. A high-energy host (who remains in the corner of the screen-much like popular YouTube and Twitch stars) takes students through a topic by slowly going through the coding actions displayed on the screen in real-time. While it may be beneficial to have two screens, it isn’t necessary. CodaKid shows you how you can work on a single screen. The self-paced program allows you to stop and go as needed. Lessons range in time required. Kids can pause classes, stop, and come back and repeat them as needed.

Teaching Multiple Children with CodaKid

Are you worried about the expense if you have more than one child? If you are interested in enrolling multiple children, the family option is the way to go. The family option includes three students for under the cost of two individual students.

Will My Kids Like CodaKid?

There is never a guarantee with any curriculum, but CodaKid does offer a FREE TRIAL! You can try 14-days of the self-paced course or two sessions of private 1-on-1 tutoring at no cost, which should give you some time to check and try it out and see if it’s a good match for your child.

Coding is becoming more and more prevalent in our daily lives. Our entire world runs on code. Therefore, our kids need to understand it as much as math and science. “CodaKid‘s mission is to prepare children for the future with this all-important, 21st-century skill.”

Let’s Talk about Coding with CodaKid

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