How to Teach Children Coding: An Age-by-Age Guide for Parents and Teachers

Teaching a child to code does not start with a programming language. Education authorities and the nonprofits that build the world's most-used children's coding tools describe a progression: understanding algorithms first, then manipulating ready-made visual blocks, and only later, if at all for young children, writing text-based code.

Step-by-step guide by age

1. Around age five, start with 'unplugged' algorithm thinking rather than a screen. England's national curriculum requires Key Stage 1 pupils (ages 5–7) to understand what algorithms are and that programs run by following precise, unambiguous instructions — a concept that can be taught through everyday sequencing before any device is involved.
2. Introduce drag-and-drop, block-based tools once a child can follow simple on-screen instructions. Scratch, built at the MIT Media Lab in 2007 and now maintained by the nonprofit Scratch Foundation, and the free K-12 curriculum from CodeAI (the organisation formerly known as Code.org) both use blocks instead of typed syntax so children do not need to know a programming language's grammar.
3. Teach the specific building blocks that Key Stage 2 (ages 7–11) adds in England's curriculum: sequence, selection, repetition, variables, and basic input and output, alongside decomposing a problem into smaller parts.
4. Treat debugging as a normal, expected step rather than a mistake. England's Key Stage 2 requirements explicitly list the ability to detect and correct errors in algorithms and programs as a core skill, not an exception.
5. Let children build and share complete projects instead of only completing isolated exercises. Scratch describes itself as a 'safe, moderated online community' where young people share the stories, games and animations they create with peers worldwide.
6. Follow a structured, free curriculum rather than a series of unrelated tutorials. CodeAI reports that its K-12 courses have reached more than 150 million students and trained over 3 million teachers across 190 countries, giving a tested sequence to follow instead of ad hoc activities.

What the UK curriculum requires at each stage

What research shows about coding and children's thinking

A study published in Frontiers in Psychology in December 2019 by researchers at the University of Padova tested coding lessons using Code.org activities with primary-grade children. In a cluster-randomized trial with 76 first graders (ages 5–6), children who received eight coding lessons over one month improved more on tests of planning and inhibition — both executive-function skills — than children who did standard STEM activities instead. A second study tracked 38 second graders (around age 7) over seven months and found that even one additional month of coding produced gains on these measures comparable to, or larger than, the gains seen across the full seven months of ordinary curriculum work.

Free platforms most widely used

• Scratch — a block-based language with no typed syntax, created at the MIT Media Lab and now run by the Scratch Foundation; the foundation says more than 200 million children have created projects on it and users have published over one billion Scratch projects.
• CodeAI (formerly Code.org) — a free K-12 curriculum covering computer science, AI science and data science; the organisation reports reaching over 150 million students and training more than 3 million teachers in 190 countries.