In this blog post, I will be sharing some tips for kids to get started with programming. These courses and websites worked for me, but every kid learns differently. Just some ideas.

First, my dad introduced me to Scratch, an online block-based programming tool. Scratch helped me understand the coding constructs. It provides an easy drag-and-drop interface and is fun for kids to tinker around with. There is a similar tool from Google called Blockly. It seems like a better version of Scratch, but I haven’t really used it much.

Khan Academy is probably my favorite educational website, mainly because it’s fun and it provides many different subjects. I did a Khan Academy course called Intro to JS: Drawing & Animation. In the course, I moved from using blocks to actually writing lines of code myself. This was the very first time that I had actually written real code.

Once I was more comfortable with basic programming, I did a course on Codecademy called Introduction to JavaScript. While taking this course, I stepped up from drawing and doodling to using code for more complex and interesting projects.

To sharpen my JavaScript knowledge, I used A Smarter Way to Learn JavaScript by Mark Myers. This book is full of questions and exercises and helps you validate your JavaScript knowledge.

For building Alexa skills, knowledge of AWS services such as Lambda, DynamoDB, CloudWatch, and S3 is required. With most of it, my dad helped me learn about the core AWS services.

To develop Alexa skills, I learned through various free courses and resources available. Here are some helpful links.

https://www.codecademy.com/learn/learn-alexa
https://acloud.guru/learn/intro-alexa-free
https://developer.amazon.com/en-US/alexa/alexa-skills- kit/resources/training-resources/cake-walk
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfY-LopSxGekh9LruXLjffg
https://developer.amazon.com/en-US/blogs/alexa

If you would like to take the AWS Certified Alexa Skill Builder – Specialty 2020, then this is a great preparatory course.
https://learn.acloud.guru/course/aws-certified-alexa-skill-builder-specialty/dashboard

Hope this will help somebody on Planet Earth. 🙂