Learn to code through games

CODECOMBAT

Cost: Free and Paid version ($9)

Teacher support: YES

**Description: **

It’s quite cool! Supported languages as seen on the picture are Python, JavaScript, CoffeeScript, Clojure and Lua. It’s essentially a proper RPG where you control your character movements through writting the code to avoid obstacles and collect all the collectibles on the way.

CODEINGAME

Cost: Free for developers

Teacher support: NO

Description:

This is certainly for my kind of demographic. Basically it has many different puzzles and games to develop with and solve the challenges. It seems as a good kind of game to test & sharpen your development skills. I would for sure recommend this one to anyone who wants to be a developer and improve himself and learn something new in the process, such as a different language for example. There can also be Employers searching for developers through their system and through organized challenges. A bit of a snippet from their website: “The best place to hire developers
CodinGame for Work allows you to source, screen, and recruit bright and creative developers” for the end.

CHECK.IO

Cost: Not 100% sure, but seems to be subscription based, but not interested into this one to investigate further

Teacher support: No?

Description:

Well as far as I saw they have some really cool looking coding visual-istic challenges with quite a healthy community, but loading times seem to be still a bit problematic as well I don’t really like being forced signing up in advance without at least a small try of the pie in advance.

BETATHEGAME

Cost: Free trial, Paid version

Teacher support: No ? (Probably)

Description:

It offers their own language and that can make it tricky and less applicable to general coding, but useful nonetheless.  The UI itself is a bit wonky at times and is not necessarily the most intuitive. It consists of mostly short kind of code snippets with which users progress through the levels to the end goal.

TYNKER — HOUR OF CODE

Cost: They have some free play under HERE

Teacher support: YES

Description: It reminds me of some kind of simplified Scratch from MIT. Basically you ahve different code building blocks through which you can create different actions such as attacks, special attacks and progressively more different actions you can take in your quest to conquer the nature 🙂 And I see Scratch as a good “next step” to take after finishing learning and using this game.

I hope the screenshots will help explain my point.

CODEMONKEY

Cost: Partly free and Paid (More info on cost here, starts with 29$ yearly)

Teacher support: YES

Description:

Looks a bit simple in a way, with your banana monkey going round about the green fields over the rivers, tortoises and trying to collect all bananas. Instruction and logic learning is quite simple and it seems to  be best suited for demographic of around 3rd class of elementary school and similar. Maybe you want to get your child interested into something different? But other examples look to hard or not appropriate yet? Maybe this one could be a good starter.