At home: is it worth your child's time?

A house drawn as two bold shapes, with a small lit window inside it and arcs radiating outwards through the roof.

Where to start

Parent guide

From consumer to creator

The practical difference between watching and making, and why it matters more than the clock.

Learning path

Pocket Code intro

A first mobile game built from blocks, three steps, no prior experience needed.

Parent guide

The phone is full of instruments

Tilt, rotation, brightness, position. Every one of them is readable by a child writing a game, in a single block, without maths.

Case study

The robot that sorted the rubbish

Pupils in Úbeda drove a waste-sorting robot from a tablet and took an award for it. What made it work, and which parts of it do not transfer.

Tool review

Catrobat: more than block coding

What is behind Pocket Code, reviewed on its own terms rather than its marketing.

Consuming or creating

Screen time on its own is not the useful question. What matters is what your child is doing with it. Watching gameplay videos and following someone else's tutorial script both look the same from the doorway, but only one of them ends with your child having decided anything. The tools worth encouraging are the ones where the child chooses what happens next, even in small, wobbly ways. That is the line to look for, not a clock.

A tool, not a subscription with a mascot

Plenty of apps promise coding while asking for little more than tapping to advance. A real tool leaves something behind: a game your child built and can show you, however rough. If nothing gets made, or the same character reappears to congratulate every step, that is a subscription wearing a coding label. Pocket Code, built for exactly this by TU Graz, works the other way: the child assembles blocks and something plays back, mistakes included.

You do not need to code

You cannot check the logic, and you do not need to. What helps is sitting with the frustration rather than fixing it: asking what the character was supposed to do, and what it did instead. Projects that do not work are normal, not a sign anything has gone wrong. Staying in the room while your child works out why is the support that actually counts.