
Ask HN: Toys to help children aged 3-7 learn the basics of coding? - hermanschaaf
Do you have any recommended toys (preferably physical, touchable objects, not software) for teaching young children the fundamentals of coding? I understand that at this age they may be too young to grasp all of it, but if it lays the foundations for understanding how you can use basic building blocks and rules to solve problems, that would be a great start.<p>The only toy I&#x27;m aware of is the Cubetto by Primo Toys, and I&#x27;m not sure how effective it is. Any suggestions would be appreciated!
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fratlas
Just my 2c and not coding related; I cannot recommend LEGO enough. Creative
and logical, it was a huge influence on my desire to build things that are
greater than the sum of their parts.

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stuaxo
Yup, and way better than staring at a screen.

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dpeck
Robot Turtles seems to be thought well of, I did the kickstarter for it (so
far my only one) and I think my son is just about old enough to play it.

For practicals, Shoots and Ladders may be the most like day to day coding :)

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imarg
I have also bought Robot Turtles just a few months before my son turned 4 (we
are now a few months past 4). He liked it but it seems he was still too young
for it. That is why I have sort of "forgotten" about it (on purpose) until he
is a bit older.

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jacalata
Fisher Price made a coding caterpillar -
[http://www.theverge.com/2016/1/5/10716994/fisher-price-
thing...](http://www.theverge.com/2016/1/5/10716994/fisher-price-thing-and-
learn-code-a-pillar-toy-ces-2016)

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wslh
I know I am not answering your question but having played with my daughters
(almost 4 and 7) I found
[http://www.scratchjr.org/](http://www.scratchjr.org/) one of the best
options. Yes, it is a mobile application but it is much easier than Scratch
where the kids have a lot of different blocks, need to use the keyboard and
mouse instead of a touch interface and must read. ScratchJr also motivates the
story telling side of programming making stories and characters.

Personally, I am rather skeptical of coding toys for very young kids, or to
say it in a different way: you can spend one year pushing a 3 year old kid to
learn something that at 6 can learn in a few hours and with much more insight.

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pepyn
I work with the lower age groups of a primary school (age 6-10) and we have
explored some basic concepts using the following:

Toys: * BlueBot / BeeBot. Simple robot programming with arrows. If you draw a
grid on something transparent you can overlay it on maps/images and put
"obstacles" in some of the squares that the robot has to be programmed to go
around. * Makey Makey. Not programming so much but kids love the creative
aspect and learn about hardware

not quite toys, but some useful iPad apps: * Free/creative: Scratch JR,
Hopscotch * Guided/"missions": Kodable, A.L.E.X., Lego Fix The Factory

Also, as others have said, LEGO.

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giaour
Legos FTW. The spacial skills they help cultivate would be equally applicable
to any kind of engineering later in life.

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nickysielicki
These are computer games, but I've had a lot of fun teaching my mom about
recursion through Cargobot[1] and Robozzle[2].

I think it would be relatively simple for you to make this into a physical
game-- hand tracing the execution with them.

[1]: [http://twolivesleft.com/CargoBot/](http://twolivesleft.com/CargoBot/)

[2]: [http://www.robozzle.com](http://www.robozzle.com) (Use the javascript
version, or the android app)

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iamtrying
When i was kid, i used to watch a lot of cartoon network channels and used to
by CAR toys and open them to see inside how its made.

maybe let them play with stuff like how its make to discover themself then
later they become good logical analyst.

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wchrisn
Check out makewonder
[https://www.makewonder.com/dash](https://www.makewonder.com/dash)

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cdnsteve
Kano: [http://us.kano.me/](http://us.kano.me/)

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vgallur
I know the Bee-Bot and Pro-Bot, are more like the old Logo programming.

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brianclements
Let me supplement physical toys (which are most important for sure) with some
additional ideas for building future programmers.

Children ages 3-7 are really just beginning to learn how to think abstractly,
which is a pretty core competency for programming. So when you say you want to
teach fundamentals of coding, you really aren't even at "coding" yet. You're
really at the fundamentals of math, language, reasoning, and problem solving
and curious mindsets.

So what are the fundamentals of coding that 3-7 year olds can actually do?

1) Math - I would scour the web for all the different ways you can do basic
math with any type of physical object (pencils, fruit, whatever). You may
think it's too simple, but if you take a cognitive approach to this, practice
must be done at some point with mapping a number of any object to it's
linguistic representation in one's mind. Practice counting up/down, sorting
stuff into groups and sets, quantity, patterns (2x3, 3x2, are they the same?
what's different?) etc, and doing simple arithmetic with actual objects. This
is new to them and is fundamental to everything else.

2) Language - have adult conversations with your kids, and no not about adult
topics, but with adult words and with adult grammar; no "baby-talk" in other
words. And it's not about purposely choosing large and obscure words to
obfuscate, but picking accurate words that probably leave little holes in
understanding for the child to try and reason about. Hopefully they will ask
if they don't know, or may even surmise correctly about word/phrase meaning.
This might help with...

3) Reason/problem solving - Encourage experimentation in everything. If they
see you constantly trying new things and failing gracefully and focusing more
effort on finding solutions then hiding failures, you've taught them one of
the most important lessons of all. Try, try, try many times, then go ask
someone. You should be unquestionably _the_ expert in some things, and a
complete novice that asks questions and learns quickly in other things, and
they should watch you in both situations. Seeing role models do both is an
immensely powerful thing to observe to young children. It shows that adults
can be both powerful professionals and learners. Where do you think they learn
to laugh at, criticize, and fear failure? It's cultural. Make failure just
another step to mastery.

4) Curious mindsets - in every category above, there are always opportunities
to ask "why do you think this is?" or "how do you think this works?". You
might get gibberish most of the time but it doesn't matter, they are going
through the thought process and will get better with age. They need to be very
comfortable with those questions at early ages and keep being willing to
answer them. When they stop caring, THAT'S the problem.

So to try and answer your question more concretely, you can buy expensive toys
made for programming but I don't see what it will accomplish. LEGOs are the
gold standard, but really, every-day objects can do much of the above. Build a
fort! Why are we building a fort? How do we do it? Tell me the steps for
building a fort so we can do it again someday. How do we improve this fort?
Tell me the steps for improving...

