young boy smiling at camera with laptop open while learning to code

How to Use Interactive Coding Games for Kids to Teach Important Technology Skills

There are plenty of coding games for kids, and many of them are highly rated and pretty reliable, but just because you have the tools, it doesn’t guarantee success.

Here is a little advice to help you teach technology skills using coding games.

In essence, if you can teach kids about coding, they can pretty-much understand how most technology functions at a very basic level.

Action Creates a Reaction

Teaching a child the basic concepts behind coding, such as how an action creates a reaction, may help your child later in life. Helping a child to understand the concepts and software code audit behind coding may help make your child more tech savvy as a whole.

Also, being able to code, or at least understand the concepts of coding, may come in handy later in life. Your kid may be working on a website or trying to add a patch to a game and may use what he or she knows about coding to make the task a little easier.

kids sitting at table with laptops learning coding

Work Hard to Manage Expectations

The fewer expectations your child has, then the easier it is to teach your child about coding and programming.

The difficulty arises when kids are led to believe that teaching them coding will make them expert hackers or game developers. They often want to skip to the good stuff without putting in the foundation work first.

Opposite expectations may also cause similar difficulties. For example, if a child thinks that coding is dull or boring, then that expectation may color the experience a child has and may make the learning process more difficult. 

Scale Up or Scale Back Your Involvement During Code Games

In an ideal world, you will both play the same game and both contribute equally to the completion of the game. However, it is very easy for parents to steam ahead and take too much control over the game, leaving the child to watch and not learn.

On the other hand, if you leave your child to do all the work in the game, then the child may feel as if you are not engaging in the process and may lose interest.

It is a tricky dilemma, but your actions can be dictated by how much your child understands and how much fun your child is having.

For example, if your child is offering solutions to the game’s puzzles, then even if the solutions are wrong, but you understand the logic behind the answer, then things are fine.

If you find yourself giving most of the answers and doing most of the work while your child watches, then you need to scale back your involvement in the coding game and let your kid take the lead for a while.

Try to Test Your Kid Secretly

One way of testing knowledge and understanding it through tests, but even enthusiastic kids may not enjoy the idea of being tested on what they are learning. That is why you need to enter each session with a plan. Coding for kids is one of the best methods to test their knowledge and understanding.

You need to find several ways to test your child. Sometimes, you may simply test a child by watching how well they do on a game, but other times it may be through pointed questions.

Alternatively, you can fake that you do not understand something and see if you can get your kid to explain it to you.

You may even fake it as if you are getting something wrong on the interactive game, and then see if your child can find a way in the game to either win or to get out of the trouble you caused in the game.

Another way to test your kid’s knowledge is to have them teach you something, perhaps having them teach you something about a coding game that you both just completed.