Harald's Random Stuff

Recently for an initiative of my workplace I was looking for a programming course for children. Think “Hour of Code”, but make that 3 hours and “real” programming. “Real” programming means: typing code and getting potentially syntax errors. Target age bracket was 11-14 years old (Junior High School in Japan).

http://www.crunchzilla.com/code-monster looked by far best, however we are in Japan and children don’t need to be distracted with English when learning something new like JavaScript. So I extended the code to include more languages (German first as I can handle all aspects of it, but the main target was Japanese). The code was the easy part. The text and explanations were a lot of work. I’d guess 40h for German, but easily double that for Japanese since you have to watch out to use Kanjis which the children of that age were taught. Thanks for the Japanese translation go to my coworkers and for my wife who all contributed.

Well, it’s done and it was a success: children liked it and it worked flawlessly. The forked repo is here and if you are impatient, you can learn it directly from this link.

Greg was kind enough to merge my changes, so anyone can now relatively painlessly add more languages.