By Jon Woodcock
A step-by-step guide that walks your child through building real, playable video games in Scratch, the free block-coding tool made for beginners.
Some coding books explain how computers think. This one hands your child the tools and says: build a game. Scratch is the free block-coding language made for this age. Instead of typing code, your child snaps colored command blocks together to make characters move and react. DK's guide walks them through a whole run of real games with it: a maze game, a jumping game, a shoot-the-target game, and more. Each one is broken into numbered steps, with a picture of exactly what the screen should look like at every stage. By the end they've built games they can play and send to a friend.
Scratch was built for eight-to-twelve-year-olds, and DK's format plays to that. A picture at every single step means your child can mostly follow along on their own and still end up with a game that runs. That last part matters more than it sounds: finishing a project that actually works is a real motivator, and it's the thing worksheet-style coding books rarely deliver. The games also live on Scratch's own free website, so a child who catches the bug has somewhere to keep building once the book runs out of pages.