If kids are good at computers and web applications, they can achieve success academically as well as professionally. Teaching students how to program a computer is as valuable as teaching them how to operate it.
“Learning to code is
useful no matter what your career ambitions are.“ – Arianna Huffington, Founder, The Huffington Post
“Learning to write programs stretches your mind, and helps you think better, creates a way of thinking about things that I think is helpful in all domains.“- Bill Gates
Programming makes your kid a tech genius, creates multiple career opportunities, builds logical thinking, becomes a great hobby and develops skills. Learning to code is no longer difficult with the present technology, there are many technological approaches that help your kids learn to program with ease. In this article, we provide you with the information about HopScotch, a fantastic iPad app to introduce kids to the language of code. Let’s learn about it.
HopScotch is an excellent iPad app dedicated to teaching kids the coding language. HopScotch’s functionality is an “easy-to-use visual programming language” that enables kids to create their own games and animations.
Quick Guide:
This is a step-wise of creating code for a basic function of a game. Open the application, hit “new” to start a new project and choose any object as your character from the list of many. Inspired by MIT’sScratch, the Hopscotch programming language works by dragging and dropping blocks into scripts. If you want your character to move left and right when you tilt your iPad in the respective direction, the program in the form of steps is as follows. A title- “When I press the play” is displayed, click on that drop down menu and select “When I tilt the iPad right”. Go to top left corner, click on “motion”, drag the “move” coding block over underneath command. You may change the size of the coding block according to the distance you want your character to move. Once you’re done with this, press play and tilt your iPad towards the right, you will see the object moving right. This app lets your kids realize that coding is just the way of telling iPad to do things. If you want the object to move left when you tilt the iPad left, hit “new script”, repeat the same procedure and assign negative sign to the size of the “move” coding block. This action lets kids know the relation between the direction and sign. As you get more advanced, you can add more objects and use custom events, such as shaking and tilting the iPad,to run your code.
With HopScotch HD, anybody can code and it’s designed especially for kids to learn to code. It empowers them to do anything they can imagine and enables them to play at any level they’re comfortable with.
“My daughter always thought computer programming was for boys, but she could not put down Hopscotch, and said building a game seemed fun to her too.” -Michael, father of Erin, age 12
“I like it because it’s fun and you can make the characters do whatever you want and play it like a movie.” -Audrey, age 8
Jack Dorsey’sparents bought him a Macintosh Computer when he was 8 years old, this resulted in the creation of a great social networking site “Twitter”.Mark Zuckerberg started using a computer when he was in sixth grade, which turned him to be the founder of the revolutionary “Facebook”. Many of the great coders fell in love with programming as kids at the age of 8, 10 and 12 years old. With HopScotch, kids can build and perfect their own creations while obtaining an understanding of the fundamentals of Computer Science. Learn more about the HopScotch on their official website and also read their blog for updates.
The Hop Scotch HD app is now available on the App Store and you can download it for free.
Compatible with: iPad
Requires: iOs 5.0 or later.
Price: Free
We hope this information is useful for you to know about a great app that teaches kids programming in a highly interactive manner. We’d like to know more apps like this. If you know a few, please feel free to share with us in the comment box.
To get more information on coding, you may also refer to our following articles.
Why Should Young Students be Encouraged to Learn Programming
Great Online Resources to Learn To Code
