Lightbot Jr : Coding Puzzles for Ages 4+

This is an astonishingly awesome little game that does an amazing job teaching young children how to program. It is straight-out accessible to 1st grade but still fun in 4th grade. The only complaints you will hear from the kids is that they'll cry if it's over. The best part is that the app found very clever levels that slowly grow in complexity while illustrating well what the commands do. The game also isn't mad at you if your program made a mistake. Quite the contrary. Kids will find it entertaining to try out what happens when they program the robot to do silly things that don't solve the challenge. The only suggestion to the app developers is that they really should think of ways of prolonging the fun. More levels? A second round were you get bonus points for shorter programs? A third round where the robot fails if it runs a command that doesn't work?

I volunteer in my 1st and 3rd graders classrooms once a week teaching computer programming and this app is wonderful. The best part of it, compared to other apps/websites, is that it encourages testing because it doesn't frown or tell you are wrong when you run an incomplete program. I was impressed that the 1st graders were able to work through all the puzzles up until loops (still not sure if teaching loops as recursion is the most applicable and/or ideal). The other nice thing is that it is easy to use in the classroom where kids just grab a random ipad because there are unlocked puzzles at each level group, so they can mostly remember where they were and pick up from there and you don't have to fuss with logins, passwords, saving, etc.

I teach 5th grade students python and use this game as a primer to teach problem solving. The iPad game has a lot more content than the flash game and it steps up the difficulty at a much friendlier pace (for students) than the other lightbot games on the market!