I first wrote this article in 2023, when my kids were small and the pitch for teaching them to code was easy: coding is a growth career, start early, everyone wins. Three years on, half the tools I recommended have changed hands, been retired, or renamed themselves away from the word “code” entirely. So this is a full rewrite, with current prices and a clear split between what’s free and what you actually pay for.
Why Teach Kids to Code in 2026
The honest starting point is that the job-market argument has gotten complicated. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics still projects employment of software developers, QA analysts, and testers to grow 15 percent from 2024 to 2034, much faster than average, with about 129,200 openings a year. That’s the headline number, and it’s genuinely good.
Underneath it, the entry rung is eroding. Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab published Canaries in the Coal Mine?, a study of ADP payroll data showing that employment for 22 to 25 year olds in AI-exposed occupations has fallen relative to older workers in the same jobs since late 2022, with software development as the clearest case. The mechanism makes sense: the work that used to train juniors, small well-specified tickets, is exactly what AI does best. Both things are true at once, and saying so is more useful than picking whichever number suits the argument.
My reason for teaching my kids to code now has nothing to do with career odds. Coding is the cheapest way I know to practice breaking a big problem into small ones, and to practice telling the difference between an answer that’s correct and one that merely looks correct. That second skill is worth more in 2026 than it was in 2023. I’ve written separately about the human skills that hold their value as AI takes over more work, and this is the same argument aimed at children.
There’s also the plain fact that a kid who can code can make things. My son has no view on the labor market, but he’s very interested in building a game his sister will play.
Start Without a Screen (Ages 2 to 6)
Everything in this section is paid hardware, and none of it needs a tablet. We wanted to limit screen time when the kids were small, and screen-free coding toys turned out to be the best money we spent on this whole project.
Learning Resources’ Coding Critters was the first thing that made the idea land: a toy pet that follows a route you build out of cards, so a “program” becomes something the child physically assembles. The Ranger & Zip set runs around $53 and is often discounted. There’s now a MagiCoders line alongside it that didn’t exist when I first wrote this.
Botley is the step up, and the one I’d buy if I were only buying one. It’s marketed at ages 5 and up, but I started my son on it at 2.5. You program it with a card-based remote, it detects lines and objects, and kids can build obstacle courses for it to navigate. Botley 2.0 is the current version, around $80 for the robot or $100 for the 78-piece activity set.
Ozobot still does the trick I like best: the little robot reads color codes drawn on paper with markers, so a five-year-old writes a program with a pen. Ozobot has since raised prices and added a new flagship, Ari, with on-device AI. The home kit starts around $99, Evo kits around $175, Ari around $250.
One I’d now skip: the Fisher-Price Code-a-Pillar. The original, where you physically rearranged the segments, is discontinued, and the surviving Code-a-pillar Twist uses dials instead, which loses the whole point of the toy.
Plain logic games do a lot of this work too, and cost nothing extra. We used puzzles from around 18 months, then draughts and chess from about four. If you want more of that, I keep a list of the toys that have actually earned their place in our house.
Free Coding Platforms
Once a child is around seven, screen-based tools start to pay off. The free options are strong enough that you can go a very long way without spending anything.
Scratch
Scratch is still the default first stop, and still completely free with no ads and no upsell. MIT’s block-based editor lets kids build games, animations, and stories by snapping instructions together. Aimed at 8 to 16, workable from 6 with a parent sitting alongside. The Scratch Foundation announced a next-generation platform in April 2026, a backend and interface refresh rather than a new language, so nothing you learn now goes stale.
For younger kids, ScratchJr covers ages 5 to 7 on iPad, Android, and Chromebooks. Also free, no in-app purchases.
Swift Playground
This is the addition I most wanted to make. Apple’s Swift Playground (renamed from the plural “Swift Playgrounds” in early 2025) is free on iPad and Mac, and it’s the best bridge I’ve found between block-based toys and real programming.
The early lessons are puzzle-shaped: you guide a character through a world by writing commands, and the commands are actual Swift. There’s no translation layer to unlearn later. From there it opens into SwiftUI, SpriteKit, and Swift Packages, and a child can build a finished app and submit it to the App Store from inside the app itself. My kids use it on an iPad, and the work syncs to the Mac through iCloud.
If there’s an iPad in the house, install it. Rated 4+, realistically 8 and up for the guided puzzles and 11 and up for building apps.
CodeAI (formerly Code.org)
The biggest K-12 coding nonprofit renamed itself CodeAI in June 2026, and Hour of Code is now Hour of AI. Old links and logins still work. It remains free for students and teachers, covers K-12, and the one-hour intro activities are still the easiest possible way to find out whether your child takes to this at all.
Khan Academy
Khan Academy’s computing section is free and always has been. The one worth starting with now is Intro to Computer Science with Python, added in 2024, which is a better entry point than the older JavaScript track. Suits roughly 11 and up.
micro:bit CreateAI
CreateAI is free, browser-based, and needs no login. A child records movement data from a micro:bit’s accelerometer, trains a machine learning model on it, tests it, then runs the model on the board. It’s the clearest example I’ve found of teaching a kid what machine learning actually is without putting a chatbot in front of them. You need the hardware for the full loop, but the software costs nothing.
Roblox Studio
Roblox Studio is free on Windows and Mac, and publishing a game is free too. Luau, the language it uses, is a typed dialect of Lua with real transferable concepts. The argument for it over anything else on this list is motivation: kids ship something their friends actually play, which beats any curriculum I can design.
Worth knowing as a parent: since January 2026 Roblox requires facial age estimation to use chat, and accounts are now split into Roblox Kids (5 to 8) and Select (9 to 15). Read their own explanation before you set an account up.
Experience AI
Experience AI, from the Raspberry Pi Foundation and Google DeepMind, is a free AI literacy curriculum for ages 11 to 14. Not coding exactly, but it answers the questions kids start asking once they’ve used any of the tools above.
What You Pay For
None of these are necessary. Each one buys structure, hardware, or both.
micro:bit hardware
The board is the cheapest hardware on this list. A micro:bit V2 Go Bundle runs about $20 from Adafruit, and V2 is still the current version with no successor announced. Everything you’d run on it, MakeCode, Python, CreateAI, is free. If a child has already taken to Scratch and you want to move from pixels to something physical, this is the first thing I’d buy. It pairs well with the electronics resources I use myself.
Tynker
Tynker was sold out of BYJU’S bankruptcy to CodeHS in 2025 and is still running. There’s a free tier, but the real content is behind a subscription: roughly €180 a year, or €54 quarterly, covering up to three children. Ages 5 to 18. Prices move with promotions, so check before committing.
CodeCombat
CodeCombat teaches Python and JavaScript through a role-playing game. The first unit is free, and premium is around $10 a month. Ages 9 and up. Good for a child who likes games but has stopped being satisfied by block-based tools.
Minecraft Education
If Minecraft is already the obsession in your house, Minecraft Education includes Code Builder, which connects to MakeCode blocks, JavaScript, and Python. It’s $5.04 per user per year for eligible schools and $36 otherwise, with a 25-session free trial. The MakeCode editor itself is free. Note that Code Builder needs the Education edition, so a regular Game Pass copy won’t do.
LEGO Education
This one changed a lot. Mindstorms was discontinued in 2022, and SPIKE Prime and SPIKE Essential stopped being sold new on 30 June 2026, though the app and curriculum stay supported until 2031. The replacement is LEGO Education Computer Science & AI, announced in January 2026 and shipping from April, starting at $339.95 per kit for grades K-2, 3-5, and 6-8. It’s sold mainly to schools, so if you’re a parent looking at this, check availability before you plan around it.
What I’d Actually Do
If I were starting over with a child today, this is the sequence, and it costs almost nothing until the last step.
Ages 2 to 5: puzzles, then Botley. One robot, no screen, no subscription.
Ages 5 to 7: ScratchJr on a tablet, plus whatever screen-free toy is already in the house. Still free.
Ages 7 to 10: Scratch, and an Hour of AI activity to see what sticks. If they have an iPad, add Swift Playground here, because the puzzle lessons work at this age and the language they’re learning is real. Still free.
Ages 10 and up: pick whichever one they’re already pulled towards. Roblox Studio if they play Roblox, Swift Playground if they want to make an app, a micro:bit if they want to make something that moves, Khan Academy’s Python course if they want the structured version.
The only paid thing I’d buy without hesitation is a $20 micro:bit. Everything else on the paid list is worth it only if you’ve already run out of free material, which takes longer than most parents expect.
None of this works if the child is doing it alone in a room. What made it stick in our house was sitting next to them and being genuinely stuck together, then letting them show me whatever they’d made. The same thing applies to how I’ve tried to teach my kids about money. Which tool you pick matters much less than whether you’re there while they use it.
Related
Leave a Reply