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With the games that my son plays, there is often a need to better understand coding. So we were excited to do this product review of the book Code For Teens: The Awesome Beginner's Guide to Programming (Volume 1) from Code for Teens.

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[ctt template=”4″ link=”97z4a” via=”yes” ]In doing this product review, I feel that Code for Teens Volume 1 was easy for my teen son to learn and will help him in his life of using computers. [/ctt]

Code For Teens

About

Code For Teens: The Awesome Beginner's Guide to Programming (Volume 1) is a physical softcover book that speaks to both the parent and the student in “how to use the book”. Basically, the book tells the parent to let the child use the book to teach himself and for the parent to provide the child with accountability and check over their work in the “workbook” (on the computer) they create and check their answers against those in the back of the book. This book was written by a homeschooling father of 6 children, so I feel like he can relate to me, a homeschooling mom of 7.

How We Used It

Maris would sit down at the computer desk and read what was next in the book and follow what it would tell him to do. He is going into 7th grade in the Fall and he is very good at teaching himself. He was taught JavaScript. I would check over his work when he was done with each section. I myself read through the parts of the book he was learning as well. I also looked at the “conclusion” section in the back of the book that also mentions other coding languages. The author encourages the students to try other languages and that some are even easier to learn.

Very often, it would have him go to an about blank page and practice some coding words to type in. He tried out some greetings and math equations.

He also tried some word problems with coding.

They also taught him about syntax errors and had him make some errors on purpose to see what would happen. He was not afraid to try this and went right at it! I have always been concerned that if I did something wrong that I would break the computer. It was surprising to me that they were telling him to make mistakes on purpose. But, it did not break the computer. Yay!

Maris seemed to pick it up quickly and understood what he was doing, often before I could figure it out. He took a quiz and put the answers on the computer.

Some of the coding was solving equations and answering questions.

Some of it was learning the symbols for division, multiplication, division and subtraction.

We learned about values and how to use that.

We are still working through the rest of this book, but it is helping him to learn and may help him to improve in his computer games as well.

Maris' Opinion

For people interested in learning how to code, it would definitely help them. It is fairly easy to understand.

My Opinion

In doing this product review, I feel that Code for Teens Volume 1 was easy for my teen son to learn and will help him in his life of using computers. He really enjoyed computer programming. I feel like I could use help in learning code so I intend to borrow this book when he is done with it and learn what I can about coding as it may help me in my blogging. I am happy that this book was made and that coding doesn't have to be difficult. I am excited that the author is working on a second book that will teach HTML and CSS and how to weave JavaScript with those. I am really not a techy person, but the author makes it easy for me to understand it.