Parents often ask us this question to better engage with their child about their coding classes. Here are our recommendations for you as to what questions to ask your child in conversations about the coding project that their child has built.

We have a number of questions to ask your child:

  1. Students take home daily updates at the end of each day at our Holiday Hackafun events, you can read the notes and use that as a prompt in asking questions, e.g. “I see here that you made ‘Cat jumps over the frog’ game in Scratch’, “Would you like to show me what you built and how you built it?”
  2. When looking at the game you can ask questions such as, “How did you program the cat to jump when you press the space key?” or “How did you program the frog to keep moving towards the cat?”
  3. “That’s a great game that you built!” Ask about their future plans for their project. Projects can be never ending and you can continue adding more and more features to your heart’s content. You may ask, “What else do you want to add to that game?” “Are there any other sprites or characters you would like to add to your game?”
  4. You may like to prompt them with some ideas of features to add to their game, such as “Have you thought about adding another player sprite to make it a two-player game?”, “Have you thought about adding another level? Perhaps it can be a multi-level game.”
  5. Ask your child about their next project. You can build games, animation mini-movies, and interactive digital art. You may ask them, “What would you like to build next?”
  6. When looking at the code, you may ask your child, “What does that code say/do?”, “What does it mean?”

Quick Article: Coding is just like baking a cake


 

 

Cat jumps over the frog

This is a simple game we make using Scratch. It’s called “Cat jumps over the frog“.

Code for Sliding Character

We program the frog with this code above. This is what the frog’s code looks like. It is made up of 5 coding blocks which use plain English. You can use this a conversation starter.

 

We also have a Coding Kids YouTube channel where you can watch our videos on how to make games in Scratch. Here is a “how to” video to build an easy dance party animation that you can start with:


Quick Article: Top 3 games for Scratch beginners


Plus a more intermediate level game that you can work through:

 

Once you get to understand a few coding concepts, you will be able to easily understand your child’s project a bit more. You will be able to read their lines of code and get to discover more engaging questions to ask your child.

All you need is a mix of curiosity, play, and exploration and you can have a fun, engaging conversation with your little coder.

 

Feel free to contact us if you have more queries about questions to ask your child.