6 Best Scratch Coding Tutorials For Young Children That Grow With Them
Find the 6 best Scratch tutorials for kids. These progressive guides help children advance from their first simple animation to building complex games.
Your child just showed you a cool animation they saw online and asked, "Can I learn how to do that?" It’s a fantastic moment, a spark of curiosity in a skill that will shape their future. But as a parent, your next thought is often, "Where on earth do I even start?"
Matching Scratch Tutorials to Your Child’s Age
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Choosing a coding tutorial is a lot like buying a bicycle. You wouldn’t put a five-year-old on a 10-speed, and you wouldn’t give a teenager a bike with training wheels. The goal is to find the right fit that feels empowering, not frustrating. Coding education follows the same developmental path.
For young children, the focus should be on play, storytelling, and simple cause-and-effect. As they grow into confident readers, they can handle more structured projects and independent exploration. By the time they are tweens or teens, they are ready for abstract concepts and understanding the deeper logic behind the code. The key is to match the tool to their current cognitive stage, not the one you hope they’ll reach next year.
A mismatched tutorial is the fastest way to extinguish that initial spark of interest. A 6-year-old staring at a complex interface will feel overwhelmed, while a 12-year-old clicking through a preschool-level app will feel patronized. Our goal is to find that sweet spot where challenge meets capability, fostering confidence that builds on itself.
The Official ScratchJr App for Ages 5-7
Think about how a young child plays. It’s tactile, imaginative, and not yet dependent on complex reading. That’s precisely the environment ScratchJr creates. It’s a simplified, tablet-based version of Scratch designed specifically for early learners.
Instead of text-based commands, children snap together graphical blocks that look like puzzle pieces to make characters move, jump, and talk. This isn’t about learning syntax; it’s about learning sequencing. They are discovering that if they put the "move right" block first and the "jump" block second, the character will perform those actions in that order. It’s the absolute foundation of computational thinking, disguised as a cartoon-making tool. This is the perfect, no-pressure entry point.
Scratch’s Built-In Tutorials for Self-Starters
Once your child is a confident reader, usually around age 8, they are ready to graduate from the tablet to the real deal. The official Scratch website, developed by MIT, is a fantastic next step, and it’s completely free. It’s the perfect environment for the child who likes to poke around and figure things out on their own.
The platform has a library of short, built-in tutorials that offer quick wins and build immediate confidence. A child can choose a simple project like "Animate a Name" or "Make a Chase Game" and follow the step-by-step animated instructions right on the screen. This approach empowers them to work at their own pace, experiment, and even deviate from the instructions. It fosters independence and rewards their curiosity, which are crucial ingredients for long-term engagement.
Tynker’s Courses for Guided Scratch Learning
What about the child who thrives with a little more structure? Some kids prefer a clear path with levels to unlock and badges to earn. For them, a platform like Tynker, which uses a Scratch-like block coding interface, can be an excellent investment.
Tynker wraps coding education in a gamified curriculum. Children follow a defined sequence of lessons that systematically introduce new concepts, from basic loops to more complex conditional logic. This guided approach can be very effective for kids who might feel lost in Scratch’s more open-ended environment. It provides a roadmap, ensuring they are building a solid foundation of understanding rather than just copying and pasting code blocks without knowing why they work.
"Coding Games in Scratch" Book by Jon Woodcock
Never underestimate the power of an old-school, physical book. For some children, having a project book propped up next to the computer is the ideal way to learn. It encourages them to slow down, read carefully, and toggle their attention between the page and the screen, which can deepen their processing.
Books like Jon Woodcock’s "Coding Games in Scratch" are brilliant because they are entirely project-based. The goal isn’t just to learn a concept; it’s to build a fully functional game. This tangible outcome is incredibly motivating. At the end of a session, your child doesn’t just know what a "variable" is—they’ve built a game with a working scoreboard they can proudly show off to the family.
Code Club World for Free, Project-Based Fun
As kids get more comfortable with coding, they often become motivated by seeing what their peers are creating. Code Club World, a free platform from the Raspberry Pi Foundation, is an amazing resource for this stage. It offers a huge variety of creative, step-by-step projects that feel relevant and fun.
The projects range from creating a chatbot to designing a boat race game or making interactive music. Each guide breaks down a complex project into manageable parts, building skills progressively. More importantly, it connects your child to a global community of young creators. This sense of community and the endless supply of new project ideas can keep the coding passion alive long after the novelty of the basics has worn off.
Harvard’s CS50 for a Deeper Dive into Scratch
Eventually, you may have a tween or teen whose questions become more sophisticated. They’re no longer just asking "how" to make something happen, but "why" it works that way. When your child is ready for a more academic challenge, it’s time to introduce them to the first week of Harvard’s CS50.
This legendary introductory computer science course is available for free online, and it begins with an incredibly deep and insightful exploration of Scratch. It uses the familiar, friendly interface to teach fundamental computer science principles—algorithms, loops, conditional statements, variables—with university-level rigor. This is the bridge from "making cool games" to "understanding how computation works." It’s the perfect step for the highly motivated older child before they transition to text-based languages like Python.
Beyond the Tutorial: Fostering a Coding Mindset
Ultimately, the specific tutorial you choose is less important than the environment you create around the activity. The real goal isn’t to complete a set of lessons; it’s to cultivate a "coding mindset." This is a way of thinking that embraces problem-solving, persistence, and creativity.
Encourage your child to "break" the tutorial. What happens if you change this number? What if you swap that block? Celebrate the "bugs" and broken code as puzzles to be solved, not failures. The most valuable learning happens when they are trying to figure out why their character is walking through a wall instead of jumping over it. This process of debugging and experimenting is the core skill that will serve them far beyond any single coding language.
The best coding resource is the one that meets your child where they are and makes them excited to keep going. Follow their lead, celebrate their small victories, and focus on the process of creation, not just the final product. You’re not just teaching them to code; you’re teaching them how to think.