My First Coding Book: Packed with Flaps and Lots More to Help you Code without a Computer! Board book – 6 July 2017

This is an excellent science book, fun to look at, fun to do, fun to learn…

Good

I got this book for my seven year old son, but my wife found it at least as interesting as he does. It covers everything that you need to understand any programming language; conditionals, loops and sequences. There are plenty of apps you can get that cover the same thing, but the tactile nature of this book slows you down enough to actually understand and learn what you are doing. Ideal for anyone who wants to know what coding is.

Good book and nice simple and clear explanations for young kids to learn about the fundamental concepts. It’s not a book that you can go back to day to day just due to it obviously being a static thing, so solving the problems once or twice, kids will then already know the answers.

A fabulous introduction to coding for young children as well as for any primary school teacher wary of dipping their toes into coding because of an inherent fear of algorithms. This is a great book for newbies - robust board construction, well laid out, with informative text and child-friendly drawings, as well as lift the flap and pull out tabs. I could foresee teachers using this book as a basis for designing classroom coding displays. None of the activities require an actual computer - the fun activities and tasks are so-called, "unplugged", ie the principles of coding can be thought by "off-line" activities encompassing algorithms, bugs, loops, sequences, and variables. Great stuff..."Being creative - coding is an art, like painting or making music. As with anything creative, you will get better with practice" page 3.

I have gone through this book a couple of times now with my five year old son. He really enjoys it, and to be honest I don't think he's even realised that he's learning, as it's a very 'hands-on' book with lots of puzzles and tabs to pull etc. It neatly talks you all the fundamentals of coding without really talking specifically about code - it dresses everything up in easy to understand concepts that children will find fun and interesting.My only criticism is that it almost feels unfinished, as ideally you'd move on from this to a slightly more advanced book that talks more specifically about coding and the general concepts of development. With children in Year One (5-6 years old) being taught the fundamentals of concepts like algorithms, the 'introductory' nature of this book won't be a problem for children in this year group, as they will soon start to build on this. However, for children younger than this it's probably worth waiting until they are approaching Year One before getting into it.Other than that, I've found it a great book that my son loves to read before bed, and it will be very helpful for when he starts formally learning about coding in September.

This book is an attempt to teach the basics of computer programming to small children. It contains very simple introductions to loops, conditionals and variables, which are indeed the basic building blocks of most programming languages, along with introductions to concepts like debugging, pattern recognition and decomposing a problem into smaller steps. These are all illustrated with bright cartoon-like pictures and various flaps and sliders as in the pop-up books I remember from my childhood.The good aspect of the book is that the author has indeed made a very sensible selection of programming concepts as a basis for the book, and the explanations are actually pretty good. However, the problem is that it is hard to work out exactly what age he is trying to target with the book - while the appearance, small number of pages and general concept seem to be aimed at perhaps 5-6 year olds, the vocabulary used (terms such as "decomposition", "conditional", "persistent" and "variable") are surely going to be beyond all but the brightest children in that age range. As a result, the potential audience who will both be able to fully understand the book and to not feel patronised by it is probably pretty small.This is a very honest attempt to introduce programming to very young children, but I can't help but feel that some more thought about vocabulary used would have made it far better - as it is, it is hard to recommend.

Love this book- it's solid and will take plenty of use and although shortish, power-packed with information and activities to get young coding interests fired up and honed. All the basic concepts are covered in an intuitive, fun way and good in that they can be learnt without using a computer- which gives this book an extra learning dimension, as the concepts it teaches are applicable across a wide range of other learning areas. Excellent.