If school isn't teaching your kid to code, this program will (for a fee)

Ki Mae Heussner:

If you want your child to have an early start on becoming the next Zuckerberg or Gates, it's pretty clear that (for now, at least) you have to take matters into your own hands. According to estimates, less than 2 percent of students study computer programming, and it's not even offered at 90 percent of U.S. schools.

To help boost those numbers, Mountain View, Calif.-based Tynker introduced its kid-focused learn-to-code program to schools earlier this year. On Tuesday, the company announced a new version of its software that kids can use at home.

Launched publicly in April, Tynker is a programming language inspired by Scratch, a visual programming language developed at MIT, as well as SNAP!, another programming language based on Scratch and created at Berkeley. Instead of making kids learn programming by stringing together words and numbers, it gives them a colorful, drag-and-drop platform to learn the concepts behind coding.

Through kid-friendly animations and creative projects, the browser-based program walks them through the basics and ultimately transitions them out of the visual programming language into traditional Javascript.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at August 8, 2013 12:50 AM
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