This past summer, I looked for a way to begin teaching my sons about coding. We had already paid for one summer camp as well as season passes to an amusement park, so my other goal was to find something cheap, if not free. I found Crunchzilla’s Code Monster.
The site focuses on teaching kids, and adults, about coding with JavaScript. From the company, Code Monster is a gentle and fun introduction to programming concepts. It is a first step in learning to program. Code Monster from Crunchzilla is an interactive tutorial for kids that focuses on action. Code changes immediately yield visible results. Projects start with simple boxes and colors, rapidly progressing into exciting experiments with simple animation and fractals.
Honestly, I expected this to be a quick run-through of high-level coding concepts. I didn’t expect anything extensive. After all, it’s free. I was very wrong.
Code Monster has 59 separate lessons. Many weeks later, my boys are on lesson 43, still having fun and still going. If you’re wondering the length of the lessons, that’s difficult to say as the lessons are broken out into interactive learn and try commands with the coding on the left and a visual of what you’re doing on the right. However, while my boys are on lesson 43 currently, the progress bar tells them they are on page 318 of the overall Code Monster tutorial.
Your progress is saved. As long as you continue to use the same device each time you play, you won’t lose your progress. My kids have been using iPads. I also confirmed the site works on Windows and ChromeBook devices. As devices do, my boys iPads have completely died and needed recharging. They still didn’t lose any of their progress. You can even start the site while online and then get offline, you won’t need to be online again!
Needless to say, as a parent that wanted my kids to learn about coding and have fun while doing so, I’m impressed.
Along the way, my boys have learned about variables, expressions, for loops, commenting, comparisons, adding colors, and are now getting into animation.
Remember, this is free. So…wow!
Each lesson starts easy, teaching fundamentals. The cute, animated monster tells you what to type. When you type the code on the left, you see visually what it does on the right. My boys, 10 years old, have sat for hours playing, giggling, and learning.
Each section encourages children to play with what they’ve learned. With this encouragement, my boys get creative! They repeat the steps over and over, changing elements, to get different results. One lesson, they used coding to draw a tree. So, in the “free play” portion of that section, the drew all sorts of trees of varying sizes. In another lesson, they drew moving boxes. During that lesson’s open-ended play, my boys made their boxes spin. For some reason, the spinning boxes were one of the sources of their very loud giggling.
Regardless, they were having fun. They were also learning skills that could one day help them in school or even a career.
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