Learning software programming is an increasingly important skill for the workforce of the future. Therefore, a country like Estonia, for example, by default, programmeercursussen included in the curriculum at secondary schools. To young children in an accessible way to get acquainted with this skill, there are also special computer programs developed.
On this page you will find an overview of free software with which young children can learn programming.
Scratch is the name of a computer program and a corresponding programming language developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The goal of the program is for children up to the age of eight years to get acquainted with the basics of programming. The project is financially supported by the major companies in the technology sector including Microsoft, Google Inc. and Intel.
Users can a movie with a moving puppet making by tasks and graphic objects to drag and set-up. The result you can then share with others through the video to upload to the Scratch website.
The software is in the English language. To the program in your own language, select English in the language menu of the program to the top left of the window.
Scratch has the following characteristics:
Alice may young children a three-dimensional animation, interactive game or video. The goal is to guide children through the first steps in the world of object-oriented programming.
The software allows children to make animations by creating tiles in the program to drag and to place those logical structures represent. The user of the program does not need actual programming code to run but teaches the way of thinking needed for programming.
Animations created by this program are playing in a virtual world in which people, animals and vehicles to avoid. The manner in which these objects are moving must be made by the user to be entered. Immediately after the adding of the instructions and graphical elements, you can preview the created animation can be played. This allows students to learn directly the relationship between the imported programmeeropdrachten and the influence that these have on the behaviour of an object.
Originally, this program was developed at the University of Virginia, and later the development was acquired by the Carnegie Mellon university. At this latter university was the project led by Randy Pausch, known for the world famous speech "The Last Lecture".
Alice has the following characteristics:
With the Daisy the Dinosaur app for the iPad allows children the basic way of thinking necessary to program taught. Unfortunately the app is only in English and Spanish available.
The purpose of the app is to a dinosaur called Daisy moves to perform on the screen of the iPad. As can be said, among other spin, grow, shrink, roll, or jump. These movements can each other automatically follow. Children get an intuitive feel for the thinking that is necessary in order to be able to program.
Daisy the Dinosaur has the following characteristics:
With Hackety Hack can what older children and adults learn to program in the Ruby programming language. The program is open source and available for all desktop operating systems. Ruby has become popular by the framework Ruby on Rails and is used for both online and desktop applications.
In the right part of the window is the description of the command in the left pane of the window. Press "run" button to open a new window in which the code is executed. As you will see immediately what the result is of the input code.
Hackety Hack has the following features:
RoboMind is a free program that allows children a virtual robot can be programmed. Do children have basic knowledge about computer science. For the programming of the robot made use of the new language called "ROBO".
RoboMind is free for personal use. When you use the software in a commercial environment or school want to use, then you must first be a paid-up license to purchase.
RoboMind has the following characteristics:
Download and install one of the versions programs Children learn programming for Windows 10.
Devices: Desktop PC, Laptop (ASUS, HP, DELL, Acer, Lenovo, MSI), Ultrabook