3 WAYS TO TEACH UNPLUGGED CODING TO YOUNG KIDS

As a coding Mom, I have often questioned how best to introduce my 3-year old daughter to code. She is too young to have long activities and I prefer her to have limited screen time during the day. However, I do value getting her into STEAM activities early and have worked to find ways to incorporate these into our playtime together. In Belgium, we can have a lot of rainy afternoons and they have proved to be perfect opportunities to create some great games! I am going to detail my top three unplugged activities that have been tried and tested by our family!

Sequence ChooChoo

Why this activity: Understanding how to order things in a sequence is both a useful life-skill and an important part of the logic in programming! This is a wonderfully playful game that will entertain and teach how to give directions in sequence!

Materials: This activity only requires lots of pieces of paper (I recycled a lot of A4 scrap paper) and at least red, green and black markers (more coloured markers are more fun).

Preparation: First make a green light starting sign and a red light stop sign. I next suggest starting with about 10 sheets and drawing straight arrows on them. Take at least four sheets and draw left turn arrows and the same again but with right arrows. These are all going to be your train’s “track”. You can choose to expand your “track” as your game expands.

Gameplay: You and your child will be a choochoo train. With your child, decide where you will start your train and where you want the train to go. For my daughter and I, we first started with the sofa and ended at the kitchen door. Place your green light and red light accordingly. Now, with your child decide which arrow to put down next. The straight arrow will move you forward one step, the left arrow will turn you one step left and the right arrow will turn you one step right. Make certain you create some convincing train noises to add to the overall enjoyment!

If You Dare

Why this activity:

This activity focuses on making conditional statements. Conditional statements are important in all coding languages and are a way to tell a computer to do something “if” something else happens. In most languages, conditionals usually start with the word “if” thus this needs to be emphasised during the game.

Materials: All we used were legos and silliness for this game, but you could also use the roll of a dice or cards.

Preparation: All you need is to place the legos so that you and your child can take turns drawing one out.

Gameplay: You and your child will be a giving each other dares to perform on condition of which color lego you choose. It should be put in this kind of format: “IF you get a red lego, you will make a funny face!” You can later choose to expand your conditional dare by adding “ELSE IF you get a blue lego you will jump on one leg 5 times and moo!” Make certain your dares are suitably silly! I know this game sounds simple, but it is super popular in this household!

Lego Functions

Why this activity: This activity focuses on teaching kids about functions. Functions in coding are basically programs that perform a specific task. This game helps kids understand how you break up a big task into smaller tasks with functions. They will also be performing a version of iteration, repetition of a process, in this case picking out a lego one at a time until there are no more. When coding, iteration is often used to automate program actions with loops.

Materials: Legos of different colours and something to keep score with.

Preparation: You will need to have one bin holding all the legos and one bin to discard unused legos into. You will also need to have one starting lego that you will build from.

Gameplay: Each person playing will choose a lego colour. The colour will be their function name. Each function will be “programmed” to build in a different way.

• Function 1 will blindly pick a lego and if it is their function colour, then they MUST place it on TOP of another lego. If the lego is not their colour it is discarded in the discard bin.
• Function 2 will do the same except they MUST place their lego UNDER another lego. I suggest this may be a good assignment for the adult as it stacks the deck more in favour of the child!
• Further functions can be set to ONLY be placed on certain colours, etc. These can be left up to you.

Scoring: Each successfully placed lego equals one point for their corresponding function. If a function causes the lego super-structure to fall or break then the function loses a point and the game is over. If you get through the entire collection of legos the score is added up and the top scorer wins! I have to admit, it was almost always ensured that my kiddo was the winner, but she loved playing and even came up with new “function” rules for further games.

I hope you enjoy this “unplugged” journey into coding as much as my family did!