APP
OF THE
DAY
Hopster Coding Safari for Kids
Pre-coding logic game for kids
Set in a lively animal kingdom and cleverly masquerading as a game, Hopster Coding Safari aims to teach the founding principles of coding to children who are more into fun than functions.
Really young kids aren’t equipped to sit down and start hammering out lines of code. (Well, usually.) But Hopster Coding Safari doesn’t teach programming languages—in fact, there’s no text at all.
Instead, right from the start it introduces kids to computational thinking and programming building blocks like decomposition (breaking a task into smaller parts) and pattern recognition.
Your child’s first task in Hopster Coding Safari involves helping a bear reach a pool of water. To do so, your child must drag horizontal and vertical pathways to create a route, solve the puzzle, and get the bear a nice drink.
The puzzles grow more complex until your kids are helping several animals navigate multiple paths. In time, those paths become arrows and commands that need to be organized—just like in grown-up coding.
The execution is colorful and fun, but the idea is simple: By repeating commands and functions, kids in the app’s target range of 2 to 7 establish a solid grounding in coding. They also get animal stickers to populate their own zoo, because, after all, coding should be fun.