[Oxy]

Now that his school is going to wind up in a couple of days, and the next academic year is only going to begin in June, my son has started pestering me to get him enrolled in an instructor led coding or robotics course. He does not want Udemy/Coursera sessions.

Anyone here in the same boat? Which ones are decent? A random Google search only leads to Whitehat Junior. Is that any good?

[Samurai]

Whatever you do, avoid Whitehat Junior. First, what is his age?

[subraiyr]

Same here...My son, 10 years old, wants to learn to code. The point is that his besties are learning to code and he wants to join them. Looking for potential classes if any which he can enroll in.

He is musically inclined and has joined Piano lessons (Western from Trinity School of Music) and is learning Carnatic from a music teacher based in Kerala. I don't want to put too much pressure on him, but with the summer vacations coming in, I think 1 more class is just fine. In addition, he will do swimming and maybe another sport as well. Currently, a couple of seniors are teaching basketball to the kids in the apartment twice a week

[windrider]

To be honest, I see White Hat Jr as a scam. This is a cash grab preying on the greed/dream of parents/kids that he/she will become the next Zuckerberg. All their initial advertisements were basically geared towards that. Kid enrolls for a course, instantly creates some app, becomes billionaire If only real life worked like that. WHJr was later forced to withdraw these misleading ads by GOI. All these ads might look fascinating to a child growing up in this, where you are idolized based on how “tech-savvy” you are, but as much as it claims to make a child understand the logic and technicalities of a system or software, I don't feel these courses are succeeding in doing that. Beginner level class where you are taught the absolute basics costs around 8k for 7 or 8 classes. The intermediate level is around 50 classes and costs 50k and so on. Seriously, you could learn all of that and more for free on Youtube. There are a lot of reputed channels with millions of subscribers offering detailed classes on Youtube. I am sure this is just a phase and the moment something new comes along, your son will want that. He is a child and should spend his vacations playing outside or doing something fun rather than spend his time looking into a screen. I spent my vacations taking swimming lessons, playing cricket/football with the neighborhood kids and watching cartoon network(during the era they used to have great shows like swat cats, courage the cowardly dog etc not the BS they are showing nowadays) and I am glad I did. If he really is interested in programming, he can easily learn it when he is older. Don't let him waste his vacations sitting indoors and staring in to screen

[aargee]

Originally Posted by Oxy

Anyone here in the same boat? Which ones are decent? A random Google search only leads to Whitehat Junior. Is that any good?

For beginners & testing waters, Udemy is the best place to begin - https://www.udemy.com/topic/robotics/
Only caveat is, if your Son is too young, you may want to sit with him or teach him how to Google on finding answers or search the Q&A section in the course

[srini1785]

Originally Posted by Oxy

.... my son has started pestering me to get him enrolled in an instructor led coding or robotics course. He does not want Udemy/Coursera sessions.

I am not a coding person so I leave that to others. On the topic of robotics, there are a lot of (dull) DIY kits which he can get started on and learn some basic electronics to get into Robotics. I have seen some "institutes" which advertise such courses for kids but they are Ill designed and do not have adequate training material. Not to forget that kids themselves loose interest in subjects very fast at their age. They probably have seen things in action in TV or YT and want to do it.

Again as @samurai had asked how old is he?.

[Rehaan]

Just wanted to drop a line to say that the perfect intersection of coding + robotics can be found with microcontrollers like Arduino or Particle Photon (more modern).

Don't have a recommendation for a physical class, but there's tons of great online resources. Though it really does help to have a knowledgeable teacher to answer specific questions & help you problem solve.

You can also simplify the coding by using an app like Blynk.

[AG-D]

Originally Posted by Oxy

my son has started pestering me to get him enrolled in an instructor led coding or robotics course. He does not want Udemy/Coursera sessions. A random Google search only leads to Whitehat Junior. Is that any good?

Originally Posted by subraiyr

Same here...My son, 10 years old, wants to learn to code. The point is that his besties are learning to code and he wants to join them.

I am not coder by profession (a vastly different field altogether) but pursued it as a hobby during my school and college days. My advice is based solely on my experience hunting for a suitable coding course for my kid (he is 8 years) when he and his mum were smitten by the code bug inspired by Youtube videos and "success" stories from WhiteHat Jr and other similar institutes.

I am not sure of Oxy's kids age but for subraiyr's kid, 10 years seems to be too early to learn any meaningful/popular coding language. My recommendation is that the expectation should be focussed on learning the expressions, logics and actions, however it turned out to be too underwhelming for the inflated expectation of my kid and his mum. (pitfall alert). https://scratch.mit.edu/ (for beginners) and http://appinventor.mit.edu/ (for not so beginners) are good and acclaimed places to start the journey through self paced courses.

For Robotics, Arduino Uno R3 is a good and budget piece of microcontroller board with its ecosystem of child parts like sensors, motors and switches, to start with. It is open-source so any good quality inspired boards available readily on Amazon will be as good as the original one. There are lot of Youtube videos / full codes available on the web to explore how the system works and get a hang of it before the kid starts to customize it per his/her imagination.

You as a parent need to ensure the fine balance so that the enthusiasm remains and the kid don't get bogged down by the learning curve. Best wishes to the kids as they start this exploration and I am sure it will be fun.

Lastly, based on the demo classes from WhiteHat Jr, I felt while the instructors try their best but they are ill equipped both technically as well as the soft skill part of the teaching.

[aargee]

Originally Posted by Rehaan

Just wanted to drop a line to say that the perfect intersection of coding + robotics can be found with microcontrollers like Arduino or Particle Photon (more modern).

Don't have a recommendation for a physical class, but there's tons of great online resources.

Yes, Amazon has been selling IOT Kit for years together now that are very much affordable including Arduino & Raspberry Pi. Best part being, send a message to the WA number in the kit & there will be standard help with code & instructions in PDF

The downside of self learning being:
1. Not all sensors work, some of them conk off & we wouldn't know when & if it really stopped working or fault in the code
2. It's very interesting in the beginning after which creativity wings takes off after which the support/help becomes limited add to that the frustration of working all alone without even knowing why started in first place
3. Needs lots & lots of patience, say like 4-5 hours spread over a week

Happens with online learning as well, fortunately, there's a guided mechanism through which the level of frustration can be controlled to an extent

[Oxy]

Originally Posted by Samurai

Whatever you do, avoid Whitehat Junior. First, what is his age?

Thanks Samurai. He is 10.

[sdp1975]

My kids ( grade 6, 11 yrs ) did an Arduino course and they were quite enthusiastic about it. There were online classes for a few weeks and they had to build stuff. There was an advert from their school and we registered for the classes. They had shipped a kit. These are the "course trailers" https://tiny.cc/EdEnPro . The company is Ed-en-pro - https://ed-en.pro. I'm sure that there are many such similar online classes available.

I can't comment on the quality of the course and the instructor as I paid very little attention to it - I just paid the fees , but my kids were quite excited about the course.

[mazda4life]

Originally Posted by Oxy

Thanks Samurai. He is 10.

If you are in South Bangalore , check this place out https://scienceutsav.com/, not specific to coding but my daughter loves physical experiments and I encourage her to first explore the physics and chemistry before getting into coding. I also have bought her kits from Amazon for some basic experiments and those are also very nice and serve their purposes.

[akbaree]

There are some very good suggestions already on this thread.

My kids have been using code.org platform for few years now. Courses are available for kids as young as 4 years. I find the platform excellent and it is absolutely free. The courses for young kids use blockly (block coding language by google). As kids become more comfortable, they can explore the javascript code that gets generated by the blocks.

Advanced courses offer java, html, css etc.

[Oxy]

Some terrific insights! Thanks to everyone who pitched in with some very useful suggestions.

[irdevanand]

Originally Posted by Oxy

Now that his school is going to wind up in a couple of days, and the next academic year is only going to begin in June, my son has started pestering me to get him enrolled in an instructor led coding or robotics course. Anyone here in the same boat? Which ones are decent?

Hi Oxy

Is online ok? My daughter is taking robotics courses (beginner level) from this online school called https://bit.ly/tanyawiingy. I can vouch for the quality of the course as well as the quality of the instructor (Nikita Ma'am). They are extremely polite and very very kid friendly.

My daughter had an interest in robotics so we started with DIY kits from amazon and videos from youtube. But we couldn't make any progress because 1) It felt like we had all the ingredients but not the recipe 2)The coding tools were not kid friendly... no drag and drop 3)We had a macbook and most coding tools were windows only. Finally my wife found this online school and it has been a good experience so far. DM me if you want the phone number or more details about this.

Here is a video made by my kid. Will give you an idea of what they will be doing. If you like it give it a thumbs up in youtube as there's a competition going on for most likes for a project video. (sorry for the shameless plug though!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjwMsDEZPYc

Convey my regards to your son. Glad to see kids showing interest in science at such young age. Anything that reduces "screentime" gets a vote from me

Regards
Dev