Welcome to the world of computer programming! Whether you’re an expert at programming or you’ve never written a line of code in your life, you can coach young people in learning the basics of coding. Just like learning to read, cook, or drive, basic principles define the discipline of coding, and the broader discipline from which coding is derived: computer science. This book coaches you step-by-step through the concepts and commands you need to help the kids in your life learn to program!

About This Book

Coding is fast becoming a skill that every child needs to be educated for in the 21^st Century. Knowing how to code means possessing a skill that allows the children you’re coaching to create things that are highly useful in modern society — apps, websites, analysis tools, and more. Helping kids learn how to code also means you’re assisting them in developing a skill that is highly marketable and sets them apart from peers at school and later, in their careers.

But coding is taught at only a small fraction of schools, and often only at the high school level. This book offers you an easy-to-understand, but comprehensive, overview of all the coding fundamentals you need to teach. We largely avoid a theoretical approach to the material, instead offering you hands-on, practical content and methods of instructing your kids in coding. Like content in all For Dummies titles, this book is clear, concise, and organized in an easy-access format.

Helping Kids with Coding For Dummies is structured in a progressive sequence, with introductory topics preceding more challenging topics. The book builds in complexity, but you can dive straight in to any chapter, to discover more about that topic at any time. You already know about variables but need a bit of guidance in assisting your kid with loops? Then head straight to Chapter 10 for help.

As you explore each chapter, keep in mind the following structure:

• Each chapter begins with hands-on, away-from-computer activities. These games and “act-it-out” skits get you and your coders thinking about the big ideas before you dive into the code.
• Each chapter has guidance in writing code snippets in pseudocode, followed by many popular programming languages. Pseudocode is literally “fake code” that stands in conceptually for real code but doesn’t really run on a computer.
• Each chapter ends with a small project that features the theme of the chapter. Projects are written in a variety of languages, but you can adapt them to any language in which you want to write them. You don’t need to buy any software to use the featured programming languages.
• Programming code is shown in monofont.
• Command sequences using onscreen menus use the command arrow. For example, when working in Scratch, you can open a new project as follows: From the menu bar, choose File  ⇒   New.

Foolish Assumptions

In this book, we make some assumptions (possibly foolish assumptions!) regarding you getting started in your role as a coding coach:

• You are a parent, a teacher, an after-school guide, a summer mentor, a tutor, a coach, or other guide who is interested in helping youth learn to code.
• You have patience, a sense of humor, or both! Learning coding yourself — and helping young coders develop and improve their own skills — requires some of these.

We’ve also made some assumptions with regard to the coding work you’ll be doing:

• You possess at least a little experience in typing on a computer keyboard, navigating a computer interface, and using a trackpad or mouse. Your background may be in using a Windows-based PC, a Macintosh, or both.
• You’re capable of using a web browser such as Safari, Chrome, or Firefox, and you can type a URL to access a website such as Scratch.com and Code.org.
• You’re comfortable with performing basic math, such as adding and subtracting, and performing basic logical operations, such as comparing two numbers.
• You can spell reasonably well, and you can locate and correct misspellings in your code. Programming languages often provide error messages as clues to help you track down misspellings, so you’re not entirely on your own here! But you have to spell everything in your code correctly to get your program to run as you want.

Icons Used in This Book

The Tip icon indicates tips and shortcuts that you can use to make your work easier. These tips may apply to away-from-computer activities or to actual coding. Tips applying to issues that pop up often may be repeated in several places through the book.

The Remember icon calls your attention to important ideas you want to keep in mind while performing a task.

The Warning icon advises you to watch out, informing you of critical information that helps you steer clear.

The Technical Stuff icon marks slightly more in-depth nuts and bolts of programming, some of which might be helpful in achieving coding success.

Where to Go from Here

The programming concepts you use and coach are mostly universal. Because each concept features hands-on activities and pseudocode, you can teach these ideas to children as young as early elementary. But really, any age is the right age to start working on programming concepts, and there’s never any wrong age to learn something new!

Progressing from away-from-computer concepts and pseudocode to at-the-computer coding can be done at any time when your young coder expresses interest. The programming snippets in this book are presented in some of the most popular languages used by novice coders, used from kindergarten through high school. All the languages are free, and all have stood the test of time with regard to their ease-of-use. Scratch is a popular way to get started, but for many programming purists, Scratch’s drag-and-drop puzzle pieces are inauthentic — their preference is any text-based language such as Python, JavaScript, or Java. Samples of all these languages are included in each chapter.

Don’t forget to check out the cheat sheet that goes with this book. You can find what programming languages we recommend for each age group, all the projects we’ve created for this book, and more. Go to www.dummies.com and search by this book’s title.

Regardless of which activities and programming languages you explore with your young coders, remember to cultivate curiosity, praise achievement, and encourage leveling up. And above all, have fun!