New Book Review: "Coding Concepts for Kids"
New book review for Coding Concepts for Kids: Learn to Code without a Computer, by Randy Lynn, Rockridge Press, 2020:
Copy provided by Amazon.
I'm in the midst of reviewing a few programming minded books targeted specifically at children at middle school (intermediate school, junior high school, lower secondary school) age or younger, with this text by Lynn at the lower end of this range, explicitly stated to be ages 5 to 7. I think this is an accurate age range for the average child, as the author illustrates several basic programming principles using a very light amount of abstraction that never gets into actual code or pseudocode.
The content is broken down into several chapters: (1) "Hello, Coders!", (2) "Awesome Algorithms", (3) "Lots of Loops", (4) "Creative Conditionals", (5) "A+ Optimization", (6), "Delightful Debugging", and (7) "Very Valuable Variables", followed by a 4-page answer key to all problems presented throughout the book, and single pages dedicated to a glossary and additional resources that essentially point to ScratchJr and Scratch (scratch dot mit dot edu), code dot org, and raspberrypi dot org.
As a long time technologist, I was first exposed to programming a few years into grade school as resources such as this simply weren't available at an earlier point in time. I think the author presents their material in a very fun manner that very gently introduces the concepts of algorithms, loops, conditionals, optimization, debugging, and variables along the way. The illustrations are very well done, always relating to the material being presented so as not to confuse young learners.