The first in a series of reviews by local experts in various fields. Today, our guest is Jessica Jolly, a digital literacy coach who helps other adults improve their digital literacy skills. As Jessica says she, “cried through all her math classes in high school but now uses coding enthusiastically to simplify and shorten tedious work.” Ms. Jolly applies her coding skills primarily in Microsoft Excel and in WordPress, and is learning to code in the R language. As she put it so succinctly, if she can code, anyone can code, and she wants to encourage adults learn these skills for their own and their children’s benefit. She can be contacted @ www.altentertraining.com.
Take it away, Jessica!
Coding For Kids
For Dummies series
Camille McCue, PhD
Is your child interested in coding? Are you wondering how you can help them learn coding skills? Or how to support their developing interest? The library has a new book that you should check out: Coding For Kids, For Dummies series.
There are 15 projects included in this book which get progressively more challenging and are designed to be worked in order. But children who are comfortable with some key concepts such as variables, constants, and procedures can probably jump in anywhere.
The author, Camille McCue, has excellent credentials in the STEM field, and in this book, she is clearly trying to
associate math with fun! She does a good job of relating mathematical concepts such as graphing (x- and y-axes),
angles, and random numbers to real world applications (no pun intended). This book also will help children begin
to reason and follow a proscribed sequence of steps to achieve an outcome. If your child has never been exposed to coding, this book is a great place to start, as long as someone who is familiar with coding is available to help with questions and concepts.
Nuts and bolts:
There is a trial version of the MicroWorlds EX, 35 days and 90 saves allowed. Your child will need to download the software on to a computer. It works with Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1 and on the Mac it is OS X 10.7 and later.
This process is a great opportunity for your child to understand how to download software, where it is installed, and the importance of looking at the accompanying README file. After 35 days, the trial license will expire, so it would be best to have a schedule in order to complete the desired projects.
