Coding for Kids
Meet Frances, our newest Featured Maker from Canada! She’s a pretty active, creative 5th-grader and when she’s not practicing music (she’s been playing the piano and the ukulele for 5 years, we’re jealous) or playing sports (baseball and soccer are her favorites), she’s also a big fan of coding with Tynker.
Frances sat with us to talk about her experience with Tynker and how she utilizes the community board to draw inspiration for her projects and improve her own coding skills!
How did you get introduced to Tynker and how long have you been coding? So, my friends told me about it. When I found Tynker and I was like “This looks cool!” so I tried it out. It’s really fun! I’ve been coding for a month or two.
How did you learn how to use Tynker when you were first starting out? What are your favorite Tynker courses or tutorials? I looked at other people’s projects first and I saw the code there, so I learned from their coding and then I coded more stuff.
How have your coding skills improved since you started using Tynker? They’ve improved quite a bit. Before I didn’t really use many coding blocks, but now I use complicated coding and it’s just really fun!
How did you feel when you found out your project had been featured? My mind was blown. That was really cool!
What is your favorite project you’ve made so far and what do you like about it? It’s got to be my farming simulator one. What I like about it is, that’s where I found out how to make shops and things like that. I learned a lot of coding. It was really fun to find out how to do that.
Where did you get the idea for your favorite project and how long did it take you to make? It took me at least three days to make and someone else made a game similar to that, but I realized that there was no shop in the game. I wanted to make a shop because you can use materials, and so that’s what I did!
How do you get inspiration for your projects? Usually from other people’s projects. People have so many really cool projects!
Do you have a favorite code block? My favorite code block is probably the forever block because it just keeps on going and going and going!
What are you planning to make next? I really like the Beatles, so I’m making a bunch of like note blocks so I add songs in them!
What’s the best thing about Tynker? I just really like coding. I like finding out about new blocks and the things you can do with them!
Do you think other kids should try coding? Yeah, I think they should! More people should code because you can use a lot of creativity and let it out and let people see these cool games and they can get inspiration to make more games!
What advice would you give to kids starting out with Tynker? Don’t start out trying to find out the hard things, start out easy and then work your way up!
Frances’ dad, Steve, joined the conversation and gave us his thoughts on Frances learning to code and how he supports her. “I think it’s really super cool,” Steve said. “I use some code in my work, we use Python and a few things for scripting so I try to get her excited and engaged in it.”
Steve loves to see her get excited about her projects and helps her any way that he can. “I support her when she shows me the project she’s working on,” Steve said, telling us that whenever they do come across a problem that’s difficult to solve, they like to work together to figure out the best way to solve it.
Problem-solving and critical thinking are the main skills that Steve believes Frances can benefit from by learning to code with Tynker. “Like she said, Frances wanted to build a shop in this game and she’s seen it in other games and online so it gets her to think, ‘Okay, well, this is how the mechanics of that process work…’” Steve added, “I think that is an invaluable lesson.”
As far as her future goes, Steve definitely thinks that understanding the world of technology that we are all immersed in now is a crucial skill to have. Code is what makes so much of this technology work, and Steve knows that being able to understand how code operates will help you understand so much else.
We want to thank Frances and Steve for taking the time to speak with us about their experience with Tynker. We’re looking forward to more cool projects from Frances. Happy coding!
