When one begins in the world of programming, that suddenly they place you in front of an arid IDE , can throw back more than one . Not to mention how difficult it can be to understand some concepts, for which in some cases it can be interesting to motivate ourselves by resorting to gamification .

we wanted to make a brief compilation of some completely free applications that can help us in our training as future programmers :

Actually teaching students how to code with robotics takes a bit more work, but rewards students with skill-building in logic, problem-solving, systems thinking, and more. Not only will students be introduced to true interdisciplinary STEM learning, but they’ll also gain valuable lessons in teamwork and collaboration. Robotics can even help students with autism learn about social cues and develop communication skills. Check out these apps and websites for project-based inspiration, lessons, and coding interfaces to bring your classroom robots to life.

Scratch 

Based on the Scratch code, researchers at the University of Berkley created Snap! , a ‘fork’ of that language with the aim of helping slightly older users (high school and university levels) to start programming .

Using an interface and a visual language tremendously similar to those of its predecessor, Snap implements new functionalities , such as the option to create new blocks of instructions or to use advanced lists capable of storing almost any type of data (including other lists or instructions ready to be executed).
PSeInt is a pseudo-code interpreter , a false language that allows us to learn basic programming concepts applicable to various languages ​​and, in addition, using the student’s mother tongue for them.

PSeInt

PSeInt is the favorite resource (due to lack of alternatives, it is also true) so that Spanish speakers can resort to pseudocode in our language , and using a program that imitates professional IDE, with its functions of syntax coloring, error detection and, even code execution.

One of its main attractions is that it gives us the option of converting certain pseucode algorithms to the equivalent code in several popular programming languages (C, C ++, C #, Java, JavaScript, PHP, Python or Visual Basic among them).

CodeCombat 

CodeCombat is, like Robocode, a video game that is played by programming code using real computer languages ​​(such as Python, JavaScript, and HTML ).

It is a freemium online platform (whose first 110 levels are free) and is aimed at children from 9 years old, without the need for them to have previous programming knowledge.

In the form of a role-playing / strategy game with a fantastic setting and cartoon aesthetic, we will have to control a magician whose spells are made up of programming code .