Top Brands: Sphero - Wonder Workshop - Makeblock - Amazon Kids
BLACK FRIDAY: Amazon Fire Kids Pro 10"
BLACK FRIDAY: Amazon Fire Kids Pro 10"
NEWS$show=/search/label/news
Here's where you'll find all the latest news about technology for children. We love to follow cool new inventions on Kickstarter and we hunt out all the latest announcements about tech toys and gadgets for the coming Christmas holidays. You'll also get our take on children's technology stories in the media.
REVIEWS$show=/search/label/review
Our kids technology product reviews are intended to help you work out whether a toy, gadget or kit is a good fit for your child or family.
There's lots of cool stuff available, but is it the right choice for the child or teenager that you are buying for?
We'll help you make the right choices and get the best value for money.
GIFT GUIDES$show=/search/label/gift%20guide
Parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and friends assemble. We create gift lists to help you make good choices for kids technology which helps them develop the right skills for the future. We research the best in Coding Toys and Games, Making / Craft Tools and Kits, STEM/STEAM related gifts, Programmable Robots, Electronics Kits and Gadgets for Tech Age Kids and Teens.
PROJECTS$show=/search/label/project
Get crafty with technology. Here we'll post all our ideas and projects using technology to get creative and making with kids. You'll find anything from making a lemon battery to a glow-in-the-dark Minecraft sword. Our projects are tried and tested on our own kids or at events we run, so we are sure you can have a go at home with your kids. Some of our projects use specific tech gadgets which we provide links for you to purchase.
STEM$show=/search/label/stem
STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. In recent years there is an increased focus in these areas of study. We like to include Art and Design too, so we often talk about STEAM (A stands for Art). At Tech Age Kids we believe Coding is a new literacy and children need to understand how technology works, practice making skills and grow in their curiosity to make a better future for us all.
CODING$show=/search/label/coding
Coding is increasingly being recognised as an important skill for children to learn. Some will learn to code at school or at a coding club, but it's brilliant if they get support at home too.
ELECTRONICS$show=/search/label/electronics
We think it's really important for kids to get hands-on with electronics and learn how to make circuits and write code to control hardware.
Younger kids can start with conductive playdough. For kids who like to combine craft and tech, littleBits are fab. And we love SAM Labs wireless electronics components for making it easy for kids to make Internet of Things inventions.
Lots of electronics kits for kids have support for the Arduino microprocessor environment. The DuinoKit Jr is one of our favourites. Arduino is a fab skill for older kids and teens to develop.
ROBOTICS$show=/search/label/robotics
We love robots at Tech Age Kids, especially programmable ones. We've got lots of them and write reviews and projects that use them.
Our programmable robots for kids buying guide is a good place to start if you're not sure what's available.
Roby the mBot Meccano robot dog is one of our popular projects and has been with us to lots of events. Our Ozobot LEGO trailer is fab for kids who love LEGO and robots.
MAKING AND CRAFT$show=/search/label/making
We're advocates of the creative use of technology, but this needs to be balanced with developing physical skills such as papercraft, woodwork, clay modelling, technical drawing and soldering. If children don't develop these skills as they grow up then physical making projects can become frustrating rather than fun.
The Maker Community uses the term 'making' as a broad term to include all sorts of artisan skills or craft activities. Being able to make things can lead to life-long hobbies or even careers. It's a great feeling to be able to take a project from an idea in your head to a real object that does something.
We're particularly interested to explore products that combine maker skills with tech skills such as electronics but others focus purely on the physical making skills that are still important to modern making.
My kids have worked through Curly Bracket and the Hidden Code, a graphic novel for humans aged 8-13 with embedded puzzles that aim to teach computational thinking. My kids are 8 and 10, so just right for this book.
Computational thinking is the set of skills that you need in order to be able to describe problems in such as way that a computer can solve them. These skills are rather important in lots of aspects of modern data-filled, high-tech life.
I should mention that I have a Maths and Computing degree and a Computer Science PhD and I'm always looking for ways to introduce my kids to computational thinking.
Disclosure: A copy of this book was sent to use for review. As always our opinions are our own.
The Book
Curly Bracket and the Hidden Code is a very nice small format hardback book by Johan Wendt and Tor Moström with illustrations by Peter Bergting.Curly Bracket was originally launched in Sweden and a Kickstarter campaign got it translated into English.
The book is in two parts: the graphic novel followed by the problems and solutions for the puzzles that appear throughout the book.
The reading guide says that you can either read the story first and then tackle the puzzles or tackle the puzzles as you encounter them.
The Story
The book is set in a high-tech future where teenagers must pass a exam that determines their whole future. Those that succeed with become coders at CORPORATUS while the rest will be relegated to drudge work. The exam is set in CODOSEUM, a game that the students have spent a lot of time in. We follow the heroine Curly Bracket on the day she takes the final exam.
The Puzzles
The book doesn't actually seem to clearly suggest that children should attempt the puzzles themselves. But I thought that was really important.
I found that the story sometimes gave away a lot of hints so I stopped before the hints and got them to work through the problems.
The first problem, summing the numbers from 1 to 100, is actually quite hard without any hints. The solution suggests decomposing the problem but does this by summing the numbers on a dice. I'm not really sure this is decomposition, it's attempting a simpler version of the problem, and in the example one that the heroine has seen before.
My 10 year old struggled with this problem and really wanted to do it the long way.
My eight year old on the other hand made an instant intuitive leap that got him the answer quickly. Not quite a quickly as Curly, but he was slightly mislead by the text which suggested splitting the numbers into two groups. He did this and then solved the problem for each group and added them back together (now that is decomposition!) Each half was harder than solving the problem as a whole!
They both easily understood the solution when they saw it explained.
They sailed through the next three problems, but got a lot of value from understanding the optimal solutions.
The exception being my eight year old struggling with the robot navigation problem because he can't tell left from right. He uses the 'make an L with your left hand' trick but somehow had his hand upside down ... That's my genetics I'm afraid. He solved the problem but a bit more slowly than his older brother.
Aside: I just want to say here that if you struggle to program robots around mazes it doesn't necessarily mean you're bad at programming. It may mean you have poor spatial awareness. (I'm so glad I wasn't exposed to LOGO as a child, it might have put me off computing completely!)
We found that some of the problems weren't actually very well defined. There's a variant of the classic farmer/fox/grain problem which doesn't give you all the rules. My kids have seen this problem so many times that they both wrote down the correct answer instantly but I can imagine that kids who hadn't seen the problem before would struggle to understand what was being asked of Curly Bracket.
My 8 year old was very unhappy with the solution given to this problem. The solution took one more step than he was expecting. It turned out that swapping the contents of the boat is counted as a step in one place but it isn't elsewhere. He wouldn't leave the problem until he had understood the discrepancy.
The puzzles in the second half of the book were quite quick to solve. We were confused by one code-breaking puzzle (though the kids solved it) and it turns out that the image in the problem section is not the same as the one in the story which does make sense.
May be the lack of clear problem definitions is because the authors aren't expecting children to solve the problems, but that seems like a missed opportunity. For some of the puzzles the problem is explained at the back but the solution is on the facing page so kids would see it immediately (I covered it with a sheet of paper!)
Is this Computational Thinking?
The book includes a glossary of computational thinking terms, but they aren't very easy to access for children in comparison to the story and the problems.My children didn't have the science domain knowledge to access the definition of abstraction so we got side-tracked with science.
The book also gives four steps to computational thinking: decompose, pattern recognition, design algorithm, abstraction. This implies that they are done in that order which they're not.
However, if the question is "does the book get kids thinking in similar ways to those required to get computers to solve problems?" then I think the answer is yes.
Verdict
This book has a lot of typos and I wasn't always comfortable with the way the vocabulary of computational thinking was used (but it is tricky to get right and I'm not convinced that the vocabulary itself is that important for kids.) Those are minor quibbles though in the context of a fantastic resource to get kids brains working.
"They need to write books 2, 3, 4, 500 and of course everything in between."
My kids got so much from the book. They had the feeling of exhilaration that I remember from solving Raymond Smullyan's logic puzzles at a similar age.
They enjoyed the story and illustrations and the setup of having the puzzles embedded in a story.
When working through the first half of the book my 8 year old said "This is 300 times harder than anything we do in maths at school." (he meant that as a positive thing.) It's a fair point, maths can seem a bit dull if you're good at maths and not exposed to things you find difficult. You can make the depth argument up to a certain point, but I think all kids should be working just as hard as each other. There's so much value in that feeling of working at the edge of your ability.
My son also said "They need to write books 2, 3, 4, 500 and of course everything in between." A second book 'Corporatus Secret' is coming soon.
For both of my kids some of the Curly Bracket puzzles actually felt hard (but approachable) which is refreshing for something targetted at their age range. It was also fun.
I'd recommend that you use the book in the way we did for kids who are confident to tackle the problems. It will be a missed opportunity if kids just read the solutions.
We'd like to see more books like this.
We'd like to see more books like this.
/fa-fire/ MONTH TRENDING$type=list
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/fa-dice/ RANDOM$type=blogging$m=0$cate=0$sn=0$rm=0$c=3$va=0$src=random-posts
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- let's start coding
- lights
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- little kids
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- logic
- logical thinking
- loom
- machines
- magnetic
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- makedo
- maker
- makey makey
- making
- mardles
- mars
- mars rover
- marty
- math
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- mbot
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- me arm
- meccano
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- meccanoid 2.0
- merge vr
- mews
- michael faraday
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- microcontroller
- microscope
- microsoft
- middle school
- miles kelly
- mindstorms
- minecraft
- minecraft mods
- mixed reality
- mobile
- modular electronics
- monsters university
- morse code
- mothers day
- motion capture
- motors
- mover kit
- movie
- movies
- mu
- mu toys
- munzee
- music
- my first robot
- national dog day
- nature
- new
- new year
- news
- news coding
- nikola tesla
- nintendo
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- ohbot
- ollie
- on the web
- opinion
- origami
- osmo
- outdoors
- ouya
- ozobot
- papercraft
- paperwhite
- parental controls
- parenting
- parrot
- pc
- people
- pet tech
- pets
- phone
- photography
- photon
- physics
- pi day
- picks
- pimoroni
- pinoccio
- pixel kit
- pixelart
- play
- playstation 4
- plezmo
- pocket code
- pocket money
- pokemon
- pokemon go
- poll
- pre order
- pre-teens
- prehistory
- preschoolers
- primary
- printable
- products
- professor einstein
- programming
- project
- projects
- puzzles
- python
- racing
- raspberry pi
- reading
- reivew
- remote control
- research
- resource
- resources
- retro
- review
- rights
- robot
- robot dog
- robot fish
- robot wars
- ROBOTERRA
- roboticals
- robotics
- robots
- role models
- role play
- romo
- romotive
- root
- rover
- safety
- sam labs
- samuel morse
- sandbox
- schools
- science
- scratch
- scratchjr
- screen time
- screenless
- screens
- sensors
- servos
- simbrix
- skills
- skylanders
- skylanders superchargers
- skylanders swap force
- smart pens
- smartphone
- smartwatch
- snap circuits
- social media
- solar power
- soldering
- sonic pi
- sony koov
- sound
- space
- sparki
- speaker
- speech sythesis
- sphero
- sphero mini
- spider
- star wars
- stars
- STEAM
- stem
- stikbot
- stop motion
- stop motion studio
- storage
- story
- strawbees
- students
- subscription
- subscriptions
- sugru
- summer
- swift
- tablet
- tablets
- tangible coding
- tech
- tech age
- tech craft
- tech is bad
- tech is good
- tech toys
- tech will save us
- technology
- technology will save us
- teens
- teknikio
- tekno
- teksta
- tenka labs
- tesla
- textiles
- thames & kosmos
- the extraordinaires
- tim berners lee
- tinkercad
- tinybop
- toddlers
- toot-toot
- top pick
- touch
- toy
- toys
- travelling
- TTS
- TV
- tween
- tweens
- tynker
- typing
- ux
- vehicles
- videos
- view-master
- views
- virtual reality
- voice assistants
- voice recognition
- vr
- vtech
- web
- websites
- wifi
- wii
- wii u
- windows 8
- wonder workshop
- wowwee
- writing
- writing. education
- xbox one
- xyzprinting