Children Can Learn Coding While Gaming: Tommy The Turtle

Now that gaming has grown to be a large part of pop culture, there seems to be more and more games that introduce programming concepts (I’m looking at you, Little Big Planet 2, with your ‘and’ / ‘or’ gates). 

To that end, Zyrobotics (an e-learning company) recently released Tommy The Turtle — an interactive educational game that teaches young children coding. According to the app’s page on iTunes, it teaches kids how to do this by using an interface of simple commands to make Tommy move, dance, or sing. They even implement a challenge mode to test kids’ coding abilities.

There is also voice guidance to help kids better understand a task and 3-D animated graphics, with cute animals acting as animated tutors — like a more adorable version of Clippit.

The best part is that it is free to play, and there are no in-app purchases or advertisements.

Although it says this game is made for kids between the ages of 6-8, Zyrobatics says kids of all ages can learn programming. Maybe I’ll give it a shot, so I can finally understand ‘and’ and ‘or’ gates.