SCRATCHPAD’s coding courses for kids is designed to be flexible. Rather than a rigid pathway based on grade levels, the courses are based on the developmental level and prior experience.

Our coding courses for kids are innovative and are designed for elementary, middle-schoolers and high school students that teach computer programming skills through interactive and exciting projects. These sessions are perfect for children helping them to acquire a great imagination, helping them to figure out how things work or simply getting them to understand technology like never before. The move from being users to creators of technology.

Our courses provide a platform for children to have a blast while creating video games, animated stories and bringing their imaginations to life. Along the way children learn basic coding and programming, problem solving, logic, mathematics physics and more.

The courses use a unique design, in which concepts and skills are revisited in each course while diving deeper each time, achieving mastery on the way.

During each session students work with our various technology tools at their own pace with the support and encouragement of the supervisors. Our future computer whiz are guided and helped along the way and by the end of the session feel a great sense of accomplishment!

The course uses both online and offline activities, in which students can learn computing concepts with or without a computer.

The online portion uses self-paced tutorials, which teach programming instructions to explore and practice algorithmic thinking.

These tutorials are served as incrementally challenging bite-sized puzzles that take the students through increasing levels of complexity to explain basic programming concepts. Once the students understand the basic constructs, it becomes easy for them to take up further challenges, which include solving real world problems.

At this stage, they will be introduced to programming languages, databases, markup, and stylesheets to start putting their new found skills to demonstrable use. Some of the technologies they will be introduced to will include HTML, CSS, Node.js, AngularJS, React, MongoDB etc. along with any hybrid frameworks that make working with these technologies easier.

The offline portion provides a fun way of demonstrating the same concepts by  manipulating physical objects to model computational concepts.

The students are charged with figuring out how to play games as a small group. The minor details of their algorithm, like optimising steps, are unimportant. They are shown how to think logically and progress through the game while using a fixed set of constructs. This helps them with skills for problem solving and logical thinking.

Further, when the games progress through to higher stages, points are provided for optimising steps, and this helps them improve on their previous solutions.

During each session, students based on their skills and level:

• Learn how to create characters, animations, sounds and special effects
• Develop stories
• Write their own games
• Extend Minecraft with mods that they create
• Develop Apps for smart devices
• Development of websites
• Gain important problem solving, logic and computational skills.
• Collaborate with other students to challenge and learn from each other — enhancing their team building skills.

Students are encouraged to work from home where, if in doubt they get assistance from centre supervisors. Students can post their questions and queries on our collaboration platform where those get answered by other students or Centre Supervisors.