My holiday gift guide contains a special Code Car that we received for free from Let’s Start Coding. After I made my video and posted it I gave the Code Car to Eva. I will have to make a follow up video with her because she was thrilled with it and has been using it ever since. She has even learned enough to start making the code her own and making the car do all sorts of things. I left her to her own devices and she explored this product all on her own. She wanted to learn more about coding after she played around with this and she kept at it and learned how to change things in the code. Give her more time and she can create some amazing things!
The folks at Let’s Start Coding approached me to review one of their coding kits. They sent me a free Code Car kit for me to review and to add to the Holiday Gift guide. Opinions are my own.
The Code Car is a microchip that is shaped like a car that has lights and sounds that you can program using the Let’s Start coding App that you can download to PC, Chromebook and MAC OSX. I downloaded the app to my PC so that I could mess around with the Code Car. Man, do I wish that I had something like this when I was 10 years old. Back then I taught myself how to program in BASIC on my Texas Instruments TI994A computer. This was a keyboard that you connected to your TV and if you wanted to save a program you had to save it to audio tape using a tape recorder and it would take hours to save and hours to load. I worked on my code all the time to make the screen do a ton of different things.
My kids have it so lucky because with the Let’s Start Coding app they can learn the basic functions and concepts of coding and see the results of their learning immediately on the Code Car. The code Car is for the absolute beginner coder. With several projects, challenges and quizzes to go through your kids will get a ton of enjoyment and learning from this. The really fun stuff happens when your kids try to change the code on their own to make the car do things you hadn’t thought of before. Because it has lights and sounds maybe they can program it to play a song with lights in time to the music or so many other things.
the great thing about the app is that there is pre-made code that gets you started on a project and if you edit it and make a mistake you can restore the original code once again and start over. There is no way you are going to mess up that original code and lose it forever. Unlike, say when I accidentally blew away a game that my friend had on his Tandy computer back in the in 1980’s because I hit the wrong button. Oof, what a mistake!
You can see the Code Car in action in my video below.
The Code Car retails for $44.99 and can be found at Amazon.com. If you are inclined to purchase it please consider using my Amazon.com affiliate link. It costs you nothing extra and helps out the blog and YouTube channel.
