One of the most important things about getting kids to code is getting them to realize it’s not magic. This could be considered true of adults too, but too many kids fail to realize that there is a real person behind the games, computers, and other technology they use every day. You don’t need to know how to write code or even type to be able to understand the core concept. You give instructions, and a computer follows those instructions. Once you understand that, you are able to tell yourself "I can do that."
Of course, the "I can do that" stuff for the age group we’re talking about here might just be "make the chicken dance." One of the things this book does well is give ideas for starting simple and holding a child’s attention while they learn how ScratchJr works. You start with simple things like setting up backgrounds, placing a character on the background, and making that character move or speak. This book will, however, bring you all the way up to making interactive games. What’s more exciting than that?
A typical chapter of The Official ScratchJr Book: Help Your Kids Learn to Code will start out with activities, which are short tasks such as "Build a snowman" or "Make your cat move." Hints are provided in areas where people commonly get stuck. For example, you might want to make the cat move on a diagonal, but it turns out you have to "fake" this action because diagonal is not an available movement. Challenges are offered as well. These challenges allow kids to go beyond the given instructions and attempt to figure out how to do something on their own. One of the first challenges asks you to change the cat’s size and see if you can restore it to its original size. At the end of each chapter is a recap called "Making Connections," which summarizes ways to look at the chapter’s contents in terms of math or literacy, as well gives some tips for the adults reading the book. You could say these are just more hints, but they offer guidance for adults on where kids typically have trouble and how to help them. This is valuable, as we adults sometimes forget that we ever needed help with the simple things. We forget that we are drawing on a vast number of experiences that our tiny counterparts don’t have. The connections can also help point out, "Hey, here are the parts where you are doing math and learning literacy skills, but you might not have realized it since you were having so much fun."
The Official ScratchJr Book: Help Your Kids Learn to Code does a good job of keeping each activity short, but not so simple that it’s just an exercise in following directions. There’s a lot of kid-appropriate creativity in the activities as well. You can learn to do things like make your characters get on stage and perform a play (with sound and music and all the bells and whistles). You can make a game where you have to find the ripe peach on a tree. Touch it, and it will fall to the ground. With any of these activities, they could be modified to suit a child’s interests and skill levels. After all, why just pick out peaches when you can feed the hungry alligators that live beneath the trees? Why does it have to be peaches? Let’s make a candy tree!
Why a book though? I’ve come across this question even in my professional life. Why do you need a book to learn these concepts when you can search for any of it on the web? In most cases my quick answer is that you need books and you need the web. There are some concepts where it's completely fine and productive to copy code and take advice from random people on the web. But someone writing for a blog or a "quick tips" website or even a forum is writing in a different manner than someone writing for a book. When you write for a book, you consider the flow from foundation concepts to more complicated concepts. You consider the knowledge foundation of the audience. You’re making one large coherent body of work instead of, as is often the case on the web, a disjointed set of posts. Not every book is great and not every website is terrible in this regard, but there still remains a big difference.
I have to say, this book is one that you’ll want to buy in paper form. The illustrations are colorful and vibrant and the text is in an easy-to-read large print. My 3 year old was even miming punching keys on the keyboard pictures in the book, so that should say something about how easy it is to understand the illustrations.
The Official ScratchJr Book: Help Your Kids Learn to Code is a great way to dive into ScratchJr. There’s even a section at the end of the book that gives you strategies for transitioning to the bigger kid’s Scratch. I want to recommend this book, but I also want to emphasize that this is not the only way to get into coding. See below for several online and free resources to get your kids (or maybe even your grown-up self) into coding. Start with ScratchJr, but don’t stop there. After all, that’s the spirit of Scratch and ScratchJr: don’t listen to that little voice that tells you this whole coding thing is for "someone else." It’s fun, it’s challenging, and you can do it too.
