I Built a Free Coding Quiz Game for Kids — What I Learned

I wanted my 6th grader to learn programming, but existing tools either felt too abstract (Scratch) or too text-heavy (Python tutorials). So I built Coding Star Kids — a browser-based quiz adventure.

What it does: 3 stages, 84 questions. Beginner covers basic concepts. Elementary introduces conditionals and loops. Intermediate tackles functions and algorithms.

Design decisions:

Quiz format over tutorial format — active recall beats passive learning
Locked stages = built-in motivation. Kids WANT to unlock the next level
Bilingual UI from day one — spent more time on i18n than I expected
Zero dependencies. Just HTML, CSS, and vanilla JS on Vercel
Try it: https://kidcodingnow.vercel.app/ Source: https://github.com/Songhonglei/coding-game

What’s your experience teaching kids to code? What worked, what didn’t?

编程小达人 — 用闯关游戏的方式，让零基础的孩子爱上编程 🎮