Discover how coding games for kids can spark creativity, boost logical and algorithmic thinking, build resilience, and teach essential tech skills—all while being fun and educational.
by CodeMonkey
Every kid loves games, but coding is something too many people still associate with something boring and uninteresting, especially for kids. What’s worse, with the advent of more and more AI tools, many people feel like learning or teaching coding isn’t necessary anymore. Of course, both notions are incorrect.
Not only does the presence of AI tools make coding an even more promising field in the future, but coding games themselves can be an incredibly fun and engaging screen time activity for kids that’s both educational and highly beneficial for their early childhood development. Here’s how and why:
1. Coding games bring up kids’ creative sides
We’ve known for ages that giving kids activities that nurture their creativity is crucial for their development. While constructors and drawing sets are always recommended, and for good reasons, coding games are arguably a stronger, more comprehensive, and holistic outlet for creativity.
Like a combination of drawing, puzzles, and constructors, coding games teach kids to envision and create something, all the while challenging them by giving them puzzling ways to figure out exactly how to do the thing they want to do.
2. Coding games teach logical thinking
The fact that coding teaches logical thinking hardly needs much elaboration. Only, where people are used to first studying math and logic in school before moving to coding in university, the much better approach is to use coding for kids to teach them both the basics of coding and improve their logical thinking all at the same time!
3. They build up kids’ persistence and resilience
The reason many people feel coding is too difficult for kids is that it is indeed difficult, both for kids and adults. That’s why, however, good coding games for kids are designed to offer just enough challenge and difficulty to be solvable and interesting, while offering challenge and fun.
This not only makes it easy to teach kids how to code while having fun, it also builds up their persistence. By exposing kids to just enough challenge to push them but not too much as to get them to give up, coding games are an excellent way to build up kids’ resilience to challenge.
4. Coding games give kids confidence
Achieving success always boosts one’s confidence, and coding games are designed to give kids gradual successful milestones tied to their coding progress. Coding may all take place on the computer, after all, but successfully building something yourself is a great confidence-booster and teaches kids that they are capable of creating and achieving things if they set their mind to it and invest the necessary time and effort into it.
5. It improves pattern thinking
Coding is a matter of far more than just logical thinking. Much like puzzles and constructors, coding games are a fantastic way to teach kids structural thinking and pattern-spotting. How much coding games lean into this will depend on the game itself, but overall, the majority of coding games are excellent at stimulating kids’ modular thinking, teaching them to not only see but also analyze and understand patterns and expand their thinking to encompass actual complex and three-dimensional structural issues.
6. Coding teaches algorithmic thinking
Algorithmic thinking sounds like something that ought to be learned in school, but it’s actually something kids both can and should learn as early in life as possible. Simply put, algorithmic thinking is the thought process behind building a sequence of things or events that, when lined up accurately, produce a certain replicable result. This can sound overly technical for a child, but algorithmic thinking is something we all do. The sooner and better kids learn to do such things, the smarter and more capable they become, which is great regardless of what they end up doing later on in life.
7. Coding games teach kids how to code
This may be the most obvious point, but it’s still vital. Coding games are fantastic for a child’s early development in many ways, but they also simply teach a crucial skill that’s always going to be useful later on in life, either professionally and/or in everyday life.
People nowadays worry about AI making coding obsolete, but the opposite appears to be the case. Not only are coding skills still necessary to better utilize tools like AI professionally, but with such technological advances, coding is set to become a basic skill everyone ought to know in the future to do pretty much anything with a computer. Some might even say that is already the case.
Even if not, however, coding skills are likely to be today what learning Microsoft Word and Excel was twenty years ago. Those were things people used to teach for future professional uses, but nowadays, everyone uses such programs on an almost daily basis. Similarly, teaching kids to code today is almost certainly to equip them with the next most-crucial life skill.
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