School Days: Code For Teens

I'm going to be honest here, in some respects, homeschooling seemed to be a little easier when my daughters were younger. With subjects focusing on letters, numbers, and spelling, the curriculum was way less complex. Now that my oldest is entering high school, and my youngest begins her last year of junior high, the question of their future careers is in the forefront of my mind. I'm not old, but I do realize that the requirements of many fields of study now require a deeper understanding of technology than those that were prominent in my coming of age years. For example, I had never even heard of "coding". But today, coding, or software engineering, is growing at a tremendous speed, regarding career options. Now, I am still very old school, and as we began this school year, the subject was all but absent from my mind. My 12 year old daughter on the other hand, has proven to be fairly adept with technology. When our family was given the workbook, Code For Teens-The Awesome Beginner's Guide to Programming, by Code For Teens , my girl nearly flipped her lid with joy.

Can I fill you in on a little secret? I was not necessarily as thrilled as my daughter. In many ways, I'm still fairly "old school", and an introvert on top of that. What does that have to do with anything, I hear you asking? Well, back in my school days, computer technology classes were pretty new to the scene, and the material was often presented too quickly for me to absorb. Being shy and quiet, and definitely NOT wanting to attract attention to my ignorance, I wouldn't speak up for help. Other introverts may empathize with my desire to avoid any attention, especially negative attention. In short, I did my best to avoid situations where my ineptness would be on display. If only this book had been available back then!

Back to the present day. We've had a couple of opportunities to sample a coding class or two, and they've been good, truly. I'm going to give you a spoiler alert right now though, and tell you that this workbook tops them all for our learning styles. If I ever held the opinion that coding, or learning to code had to be tedious and boring, Code For Teens blew it all away. Who says that learning this computer language can't be fun? Author Jeremy Moritz has broken down every step in a clear, concise way with a huge dose of humor. Have you noticed that many books geared for teens have very few illustrations? Why is that? In this book, every page has colorful animations, relatable humor, and the text is written in a conversational way. I can picture the author as that favorite teacher from high school, who has a gift for making material that is potentially dry and boring, come alive with fun.

This is the first volume of two workbooks, and will teach your teen the art of javascript. There are ten chapters, with each one including the how to's, drills, and quizzes. As you would expect, each lesson builds upon the previous material. Are you familiar with any of the terms related to this subject? Whether your answer is yes or no, your child( and you, if you do the lessons), will learn to code with numbers, strings, functions, booleans (yes, it's a thing, lol), conditionals, arrays, loops and more. Can you see that it really is learning a new language?

Before handing the book over to my 12 year old, I looked through it to get the basic layout. They include an introduction that discusses the benefits of coding, a word for parents, the lessons of course, and then a glossary and answer key in the back. It's fantastic in its simple to understand text, so all I had to do after looking at it myself, was hand it to my daughter and let her get at it. That's exactly what she did, and I'm not exaggerating when I say that within minutes of her turning on the computer and following the first instructions, she was laughing with delight. She frequently called me over excitedly, to show me what she had accomplished.

My girl is over the moon with Code For Teens-The Awesome Beginner's Guide to Programming. She has been interested in this subject for almost a year now, but had some reservations about certain courses because she was apprehensive about her ability to track with a live course. Having this book has relaxed that fear, and she was happy to see in the first chapter that mistakes were seen as a positive thing, as they intentionally created errors in order to recognize and correct them. Again, I'm not exaggerating when I say that she has laughed her way through these lessons (In a happy, "I'm excited to learn way, not maniacally. She's not crazy, lol). I knew that she was really understanding the work when she began teaching it back to me. She's already asked if she can work through the rest of the summer on this, and was ecstatic upon learning that there is a second book featuring HTML and CSS.

In her words:

"I like the layout of the book. It's easy to understand, and he (Jeremy Moritz) explains the lessons well. I also likes that he pulls in funny bits to help understand confusing sections. The illustrations are fun and add a liveliness to the book. I like that the material is reviewed a lot, and he is very encouraging. The drills, and the do it yourself sections, and the questions provide a lot of practice. I love coding, and I love the book."

An example of the quizzes in the book.

The text and illustrations provide easy to understand instructions.

We're about halfway through this book now. In her excitement, my girl zipped through the first chapters pretty easily. I can see this material being accomplished in under a semester if your teens are enthusiastic, but it can also fit in as a one semester course. My daughter intends to have this done before the end of summer so that she can move on to volume 2, but you should have no problem in scheduling it any way that works for your family.

Until now, I had little to zero interest in coding. I can't say that now. This is a fantastic, pain free, actually very fun way to learn to code. Pick it up for your home!