Free and cheap home education resources for learning coding.

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Computer science or coding is one of the subjects that has loads of free and cheap home education resources available. I am pretty lucky when it comes to computing in that I’m an experienced and qualified programmer/ developer and I’ve enjoyed dragging coding into the kids’ lives over the years. We’ve also used our local computer club, Creative Computing Club and that was how NSSNotTeen (this isn’t going to work, I need a new nickname) got his iGCSE in computer science, although I did help out too with the revision and the explanations.

If your child is young/ just getting into computing, you might want to take a look at scratch – which is free online block coding. Block coding just means that you don’t have to type the individual bits of what you’re developing, you drag and drop blocks which have code snippets attached. We’ve used this on and off for years, and it’s a lot more powerful than you’d expect. Examples from the archives of fun and games from just a year ago.

Mini computers – these aren’t free, generally speaking, they aren’t particularly expensive either. Here’s us exploring microbit a while back: microbit, and the kids have used arduinos at CCC. This looks like a good arduino starter kit at Amazon. We’ve also used raspberry pis, although I’ve no idea where the Kano went sadly, as that had a fab keyboard. There’s also a fab microbit simulator that works in the browser here

If you want to take a step up into game programming – gamemaker is free, there’s a bunch of tutorials, it’s a great way to get going with trying out making your own games. Again, the kids have used it through CCC, and I’ve spent a bit of time debugging stuff with NSSNT in the past. There are lots of free tutorials for it too.

There’s also unity which is step up from most of the other stuff, not for the faint of heart, just adding it so it’s on the list really.

A good beginner language for coding via typing rather than blocks is python, and there are lots of tutorials around for it like this one or learn python.org. We’ve also used some good library books on this area, such as Carol Vorderman, Computer Coding Python Games for Kids (here at Amazon)

For general reference purposes, w3schools has resources on all sorts of languages and I use it all the time for quick lookups. There are also full courses on all sorts of things, so it is well worth exploring further.

I hope that gives you something to go on – if you need anything specific, please feel free to leave a comment and I’ll try to help out further.