Creative Coding for Kids: A Structured Course of Short Projects for Young and New Coders (pdf)

Description

This course was developed in response to demand from teachers and parents for a child-friendly course that:

• engages students visually
• avoids complicated technology setup
• teaches programming and computer science concepts

This course is specifically designed to be accessible to young learners, with language carefully chosen to maximise understanding. The course projects are kept short, with lots of illustrations, and planned breakpoints for exploring and playing.

As students progress through the course, they will learn about, and gain experience with, programming and computer science concepts that are applicable to many other programming languages they might learn in future.The course has been tested and refined over two years with children in code clubs, secondary schools, home education groups, and also with adults in creative coding groups.

Children as young as 7 can get started with the course and enjoy how fun and easy it is to create digital art. Secondary school students aged 11-17 will enjoy the more interesting concepts and see the maths and science they’ve learned can be applied creatively. More confident and enthusiastic students will enjoy the more sophisticated concepts often reserved for advanced courses, but made accessible and fun here.

Home educated students will find this course useful as it introduces a broad range of key programming and computer science concepts in a fun, visual, and creative way that also encourages students to experiment and develop autonomous research and problem solving skills.

Adults learning to code for the first time will also find this course a gentle and friendly introduction to coding that avoids unnecessary jargon and technical complexity.

The book uses the web based p5js javascript framework for artists and designers. Students will code and see their creations entirely on the web using a web browser. There is no need to install any additional software.

The course is accompanied by a youtube channel of video tutorials which brings to life the ideas taught in this course, and covers additional topics not possible to fit into this short course.