Curriculum Overview

Coder Kids has a long-term view of your child’s progress, as a computer programmer and as a learner. While not all children will want to be computer programmers when they grow up, learning how to code teaches children valuable critical thinking skills. .

Our current curriculum has classes for children ages 4-18. Although there may be exceptions, we generally group children in the following age groups:

Young Coders: Ages 4-7 Our main focus in this age group is teaching logic and sequence through games, robots, apps, and simple coding challenges using ScratchJr. You can read about the resources we use in this blog post.

Coder Kids: Ages 7-12 - In this age range, we transition students from Scratch Jr. to Scratch, a safe, public social network for student projects. Scratch is an excellent platform for learning programming concepts like conditionals, Boolean, variables, loops, and functions. After learning for a year or two in Scratch, students are usually ready to move on to more advanced concepts like the ones listed below. Students can explore these concepts in our classes and summer camps.

• Making Games in Scratch

• Making Animations in Scratch

• Text-based Games in Python

• Graphics-based Games using Pygame

• Arduino

• Minecraft Playing / Modding

• Swift Playgrounds

Teen Coders: Ages 13-18 As they become teenagers, students are developing more maturity and are usually ready to move on to more advanced learning platforms. We teach the following skills and platforms in summer camps and private lessons (depending on location and instructor availability).

• Python

• Arduino (C) and Raspberry Pi (Python)

• Game Maker Studio

• Minecraft Modding in Java

• Web Development (HTML/CSS/Javascript)

• App Development in Java for Android

• App Development in Swift for iOS

• Intro to Unity / VR

Our program is focused on simple, fun projects that students can accomplish. We do not offer algorithm design or implementation classes. Our goal is to start teaching children coding skills in Kindergarten and continue to foster their development through the grade school years. We hope to provide them with a broad base of experience that will allow them to tackle more complicated coding tasks throughout high school and college. Regardless of which profession children ultimately choose, they will benefit greatly from the skills they learn at Coder Kids.

Scratch Project samples

Below is a sample of the styles of games our students can create in Scratch. Eventually the games students create will range from simple to complex.