Codeable Crafts
By Mieke VanderBorght,
Common Sense Media Reviewer
Common Sense Media Reviewers
Drawing tools and coding blocks are basic but accessible.
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Codeable Crafts
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What’s It About?
CODEABLE CRAFTS begins with a brief tutorial overview showing how to decorate and animate charming animal templates. Choose from My Sketchbook or My Storybook to start creating. Color and affix stickers to the templates in the sketchbook, and then select finished creatures to star in animated stories in the storybook using a small set of basic coding blocks to create sound, movement, and text. Put the blocks together like puzzle pieces and watch the finished story.
Is It Any Good?
A basic set of drawing tools and coding blocks gives young kids a good introduction to programming with only a few bugs and missing features. The best thing is how easy it is to create a short and simple animated story. Kids need only to drag simple, puzzle-shaped coding blocks together in different ways to experiment with programming concepts such as movement, repetition, and more. They also can just have fun creating their characters and telling a story. Downsides to this free app are that the drawing tools are pretty basic, limited only to a handful of colored crayons and random stickers. It's a bit frustrating, for example, that once kids save a character they can't return to the drawing board to edit. App navigation also sometimes can be frustrating, as buttons are sometimes barely visible at the borders of the screen, and bugs interrupt smooth play. Yet, overall, this is an appealing and accessible tool for creating simple animated stories or learning computer-programming basics.
Talk to Your Kids About ...
Families can talk about the characters and stories kids create. Ask kids about what they're doing, and help them elaborate on stories by asking open-ended questions.
Create a story together about a favorite character or something that really happened to your family. Help kids hit the key parts of a story arc with a logical beginning, middle, and end.
If kids like the coding part, look into ways for kids to learn more about computer programming through apps, websites, classes, and so on.
App Details
- Devices: iPad, Android
- Subjects: Language & Reading: storytelling
- Skills: Creativity: imagination, making new creations, producing new content, Tech Skills: digital creation, using and applying technology
- Pricing structure: Free
- Release date: April 14, 2020
- Category: Education
- Publisher: Benesse
- Version: 1.5.1
- Minimum software requirements: iOS 8.0 or later; Android 4.4 and up.
- Last updated: January 12, 2022
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