ScratchJr: Coding for Young(er) Kids

Project:  ScratchJr: Coding for Young Kids

Creator:  Mitchel Resnick at Lifelong Kindergarten at MIT

Description:  Coding for kids is all the rage these days -- seems like you can't go through Kickstarter pages without running into at least one of these every week (here's one of my favorites).  But it's also true that the Lifelong Kindergarten lab at MIT has been interested in the subject for a long time, most visibly in the creation of Scratch, a web-based programming interface for kids ages 8 and up.  Now, with ScratchJr, they hope to expand that work down to kids ages 5 through 7.

The website is free, so rewards are for ancillary items such as t-shirts, stickers, and seminars.  But if ScratchJr is as cool as its elder sibling, it's worth pitching in.

The Code Witch: A Pre-Teen Fantasy Novel With a Female Programmer

Description : Programmer Ada Lovelace is having a bit of a Kickstarter moment.  There was Wollstonecraft, a YA novel about Lovelace and Mary Shelley (programming and  steampunk), and now a novel from a pair of Stanford University seniors, Sarah Sterman and Elise Guinee-Cooper are writing The Code Witch .  It's a pre-teen fantasy novel featuring a female programmer, whose setup is described as "a dragon shows up at Ada's door, starting an adventure of magic and coding."

Miss Mary Mack might very well be the perfect target audience for this novel -- interested in reading and math, and probably susceptible to being swayed into coding.  Even though my coding days never got past computer science classes in high school, I'm excited about the idea that more women should be coding, and every little bit, even fictional narratives, can change the culture.  $8 gets you the e-book, $15, the paperback.

 

BrickPi: Using a Raspberry Pi Computer with LEGO Bricks

 Description : Take your Raspberry Pi computer (it's about the size of a credit card), place it in the board, and you can connect the board to LEGO® motors and gears.  The case will protect as it motors on the go.

As a parent of a child who's eagerly anticipating the start of LEGO Robotics at the start of the school year, this sounds like an awesome way to have fun and learn some programming skills.  I'm not as eager about the idea of programming a robot to become a ball cannon, but that's a risk I'm willing to take.  $45 gets you the board and case (Raspberry Pi, about $25-$40, and LEGOs are your own responsibility.)