![]() The app is easy to use and navigate and once shown to your child they should be able to progress with the app unsupervised however, the app does progress very fast and you need to be up for the challenge. The app has no in-app purchases with no adverts. A friendly Robot will introduce your child step by step to the basic concepts of programming in a colourful graphic environment. If your kid is still excited and wants to move forward, a few dollars will get you all the rest of the levels.Parents need to know that the Lightbot Programming Puzzles App is suitable for children aged 9 and upwards and is a programming puzzle game that uses game mechanics that are firmly rooted in programming concepts. Free Android game for your phone/tablet ( Google Play)įor the iOS and Android versions, you can play quite a few levels for free.Free iOS game for your iPhone/iPad ( App Store).Free online Flash game in the browser of your computer ( Lightbot Website or Armor Games).That’s OK – they still get the idea of putting commands in a particular order for the robot to follow. It’s hard to have the visual-spatial memory to get those right on the first try, so you’ll often see kids just alternating left and right until it works. One word of warning – the kids I’ve seen play this coding game often get confused by the “turn left” and “turn right” commands. It’s just like reading – take each line left-to-right starting at the top. That’s all there is to it! Of course, it gets even MORE interesting from there – but that’s the fun! One note that may not be obvious at first – the instructions in the program box on the right start at the top-left, then go all the way to the right, then it comes back down to the second line far-left, then it reads all the way to second line far-right, then it returns to the third line far-left before reading all the way to the third line far-right. But before you get overwhelmed, go back to verbal instructions. This is a screenshot of the sixth level, along with the solution already assembled in the program box on the right. Things do get interesting in a hurry, though. Finally, you press “go” (the green button with the arrow) and watch the bot gracefully walk over to the blue square and turn on the light. Then you drag a “turn on light” command at the end. In this case, you drag two “move forward” commands from the bottom to the box on the right. The challenge of Lightbot is to assemble the robot’s commands to make it follow those directions. If you were going to verbally tell the robot what it needed to do to reach the blue square and turn on the light, what would you say? Probably something like… If your kid is interested enough in the game to get past the “Huh?” moments, they have both the talent and the temperament to pursue computer programming further. Computer programming has a lot of “Huh?” moments – times when you have to figure out what to do next because you’re stumped at the moment. Most importantly, it also introduces you to the “Huh?” factor. It’s a simple game that you can play for free on your computer or phone, and it teaches you all the basic concepts of programming. I always give the same starting point: have them try out Lightbot. I have had several parents ask me for advice on teaching their elementary-age kids to program computers. Whenever you want to learn something new, find a way to make it very fun in the beginning. I started with games because games are fun. Shortly thereafter I was poking around in QBasic, a simple programming language that used to come already installed on computers back then. It was my first inkling that you can actually learn from video games, and it also whet my appetite for making my own games. I still remember the first computer game my parents let me pick out when I was a kid: Stickybear Numbers. The first step is always the hardest, and that’s why the first step should be a game! This article is part of our “Get Coding” series.
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