Baby Loves Coding

[Francisca Noggles]

Anotherprogramming language used to build websites, HTML is essential for budding programmers to be familiar with! Brightly colored to attract young children, the book introduces the basics of the HTML, to enable easier understanding as they grow up.

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is the programming language that describes how a website will look, including layout, fonts, and colors. CSS for Babies will introduce your kids with visual patterns and symbols, making it easier for them to create their own beautiful websites in the future.

Baby Loves Coding introduces young kids to using logic, sequence, and patterns to solve problems. At its very basis, coding is nothing but logic statements, sequences of events, and familiar patterns. This book is more interactive with a babies world, and uses items like toys to teach logic.

The Baby Code! Series introduces babies to code by showing where it is used in their everyday life. For example, in Baby Code! Play a baby is shown swinging with their daddy at a playground, and then playing in an automatic swing. The book explains that code is used to make the swing move, and even shows what code is used! In Baby Code! Music, baby plays a toy piano, while his daddy plays his electric piano, and code for the electric piano is shown by the daddy. Baby Code! Art shows baby doing several different art projects, then shows tools (like printers and tablets) that also create art! Showing children where code is used in their life, they will be comfortable with the idea of code, and even be familiar with some simple commands.

All these baby coding books will make programming less daunting to them later in life by showing them where and how code is used. They are all also very affordable, which makes them a great addition to any home library!

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Hello! Welcome to From Engineer to Stay at Home Mom! I'm Christy, the mom to 3 rambunctious little boys. Before staying home to raise the boys, I was an engineer for over 10 years. Now I share my love of all things STEM with my boys, and we find ways to connect and have fun!

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I've wanted to learn to program for a couple years, and I knew that learning to code could open future opportunities. I had started with simply Googling "How to learn to code" way back in 2016 and poked around with a few tutorials. I had taken an hour to write a 'Hello World' tutorial in JavaScript without knowing any code whatsoever. It was fun, and I was hooked. More so, it seemed fairly easy, and a couple weeks later I was learning the basics.

After a couple of months of this, my first thoughts about getting a developer job started popping up. I had heard stories of the 'self-taught' developer. At the time, was knee deep in a house remodel and had a baby on the way, and I was surprised when 6 months had gone by and I hadn't made any progress. I was still confused by basic syntax and was only studying a couple hours a week, if that. I redoubled my efforts, determining to study on my daily train commute.

Slowly, I realized that coding is hard. It is an overwhelming amount of material to learn, especially while working full time. There is what you know you don't know, and then there is what you don't know that you don't know. I was getting lost trying to learn the language syntax, routing, front end, back end, databases, frameworks, source control, algorithms, design patterns, the terminal and deployment! I wanted some direction, guidance, and to learn best practices.

So I decided to join a coding bootcamp, but I knew not to start from zero! Many bootcamps will test your knowledge during the application process. They'll expect you to know the basics of the language and have the right attitude. For me, I had already spent a couple of years slowly learning the basics of JavaScript. I had completed a couple of tutorial side projects, with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and had spent some time on FreeCodeCamp.com.

Having a full time job and taking an intensive course will take up an enormous amount of time. When I attended, I spent every available minute studying and I still had trouble keeping up. I made sure that I had finished any upcoming matters that would need tending to. In my case, I needed to support my family while attending, so I chose an online course. The tradeoff is that the online course would take longer than the in person course: 5 months instead of 3 months.

I decided to take the course during the fall and winter when I would have less yard work to attend to and less social events to skip. Fall and winter also have some additional holidays which I used to study. I also knew that my work schedule would likely have less 'busy' weeks requiring me to work extra hours.

I prepared my life as much as I could. This meant finishing any normal life projects I had, like winterizing my house and a few small home improvement projects I had taken on. I also spent the time fully setting up my work station with additional monitors.

I spent time preparing myself physically. I set up some new routines for myself, including a small diet change (I tried to cut out all bread/sugar/alcohol) and started changing my sleep routine. I knew that I would likely be sleeping less, and that I would need to be productive before my kids woke up. I also started to try to exercise more regularly, thinking that I could keep this habit throughout the course.

I knew I would need help during the course. I read everything I could find in forums about the bootcamp experience and talked with developers I knew. Some had gone through a course, others had not. I spent time reading and re-reading course expectations and discussed with the course admissions about what to expect. I asked as many questions as I could think of and discussed my concerns with my wife and friends to help focus my thinking.

Success meant using my time wisely. I sought areas where I could optimize time. I listened to lectures and videos while driving. While I wasn't able to watch the screen or take notes, I would get familiar with concepts or recover material.

A bootcamp is a great place to advance and accelerate learning, but the learning doesn't stop when the course is complete. There is no way to retain all of the topics covered in such a short period. A bootcamp also isn't a place to start from the very beginning. There is no bandwidth for any catchup.

My friends and family knew that would not be attending social events, outside of holidays, and that the ones I would attend would have to be limited in their time span. My wife also had to make this commitment, so that we were aligned in my efforts. I worked to spend as much time as I could coding while my children were sleeping, and coordinated the times I set aside to code with my wife.

I am far better at writing code now that I was before I took it. I now have a more complete understanding and can build some very cool real world projects that I couldn't before. I also enjoy writing code more. I got exactly what I needed out of it- an acceleration of my development skills.

I'm looking to give back to the developer community. You can follow my blog at www.santamariacode.com where I share my experiences in the hopes that I can help others learning to program.

I recently started to teach DS2 coding as his school haven't even touched on it and he is in yr 5. He is quite techie though and only really needed pointing in the right direction and given the odd bit of help when he goes wrong. I didn't want him to get to secondary and be left behind. We have started with Scratch but will also cover Python and then plan to move on to Raspberry Pi.

I work in IT, mainly through agencies, and my speciality is dying out so I wondered about the possibility of teaching coding in the same way that children have private music lessons etc. There does seem to be a gap in the market in my area as the schools aren't really prepared.

I already have the CRB checks as I do some other unrelated work for a local school sometimes. There are lots of study guides on the net and guidance for teachers so I could draft teaching schedules and study materials quite easily. Has anyone heard of people teaching this sort of thing? I'm not a teacher but I have done a fair bit of IT training in my time. Any opinions would be most welcome. Thanks.

Both DH and I work in IT, but I'm part-time self-employed, so we're planning on teaching both DDs ourselves, starting with DD1 this summer. While I think all kids should learn coding, or at least a firm base of computer science, my concern for you would be that those parents who would be interested in their kids learning, would probably be able to start them off themselves. Although I reckon DD1 would take it more seriously if someone else was teaching her!

I like the idea as a whole though. Perhaps you could also offer one-off group activities too. Like some of the things I've seen on the dreaded Pinterest, teaching binary using beads, or coding games with lego for primary ages. Then offer these courses to schools, or cub scout / brownie groups etc.

Thanks for the replies. I was going to start off by perhaps offering a friend's DD a free session and see if she learns something and enjoys it. Then I'll take it from there. I was determined that DS wouldn't be left behind, he has health issues that are a barrier to learning but IT is definitely one of his strengths. I get the impression that the other parents aren't really aware of the need for coding/programming and that it's on the NC, so I wonder if they would be motivated to teach their own children. All I can do is make them aware and offer the service I suppose. It's cheap to set up andI have the tech so I really don't have much to lose.

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