Beat Summer Brain Drain with these 7 Coding Activities

Did you know that students who read just 15 minutes a day show accelerated reading growth? Reading, and other language-based activities like playing word games, listening to podcasts, and—you guessed it—doing coding activities, are great ways to combat the “summer slide.” 

These seven great coding games will not only encourage a love of reading, but help sharpen critical thinking skills, developing sequencing skills, and increase vocabulary as well.

Code Your Hero

Grades 2-5

An Unusual Discovery: Two characters meet in a strange world and discover a surprising object. What happens next? With Scratch and CS First, anyone can create their own unique story with code.

Telling stories: ELA + coding: Students will practice identifying narrative elements while bringing their favorite story, poem or historical event to life. In this game, coding gives students another format for expressing their creativity and communicating with others.

Code Your Hero: Turn an everyday hero from your life or community into a superhero by programming them to fly over buildings, spin, work with a sidekick, and score points by touching objects in a game. 

Code Like a Girl: Storyteller

Grades 6+

Storyboarding and Programming with Alice and The Sims: Follow the animation production process from storyboarding to programming with Alice and The Sims. Creativity and storytelling drive learning in this drag and drop coding environment, which introduces storyboards, guides users in translating the storyboard into a programmable script, and demonstrates how to program a short 3D animation.

Code Like a Girl: Storyteller: Use code to create a story—and make the story change each time it runs with randomizers. Then, remix the code to write your own compelling plot.

Homophones STEM Kit: Follow step-by-step instructions to animate an interactive story with a lot of homophones in it! Each time a character says a word that is a homophone, ask the player which homophone is the correct word for that context. The player better know their homophones, or else the dialog won't make any sense!

PlayLab: Code a Story: It's time to get creative and create a story in the Play Lab! In this creative exercise, students will use previous coding skills to create an animated story.

Bonus: Check out this list of 25 picture books all about coding, programming, and computer science!