A family coding club

Learn to type. Then teach a robot what to do.

Typing drills on the German keyboard, and puzzle games where the answer is a plan you build yourself — for young children, older children, and grown-ups meeting a Mac for the first time.

Ages 5–8 Ages 9–12 Grown-ups
THE PLAN Forward Forward Collect Turn right 🔁 repeat all of it 4×

Four games, one idea

Every game asks the same thing in a different costume: work out the steps, put them in order, and find out where your thinking went wrong.

🤖

Robot Path

Build a plan out of blocks — forward, turn, collect — then press Run and watch the robot carry it out. Later puzzles cap the blocks, so the only way through is a loop.

Sequencing · planning ahead
🎨

Pattern Party

A row of shapes with the end missing. Spot the part that keeps coming back and you can finish it — which is exactly what a loop does in real code.

Pattern recognition
🔧

Fix It

The plan is already written, and it is wrong. Run it, watch it fail, work out which step betrayed you, and swap it. The most useful habit in programming.

Debugging · reading code
⌨️

Code Lab

For older players: real typed code with repeat, if and else. Mistakes come back as friendly errors with a line number, not a red wall.

Syntax · logic · loops

What the games are actually training

Nothing here claims to make anyone cleverer. These are specific, ordinary thinking habits that programming happens to demand constantly — and that puzzles like these give children a reason to practise.

01
Sequencing

Holding a series of steps in order, and understanding that changing the order changes the outcome.

02
Planning ahead

Working out the whole route before pressing Run, instead of guessing and hoping — a small act of impulse control.

03
Breaking things down

Seeing that a long path is really four short ones repeated, and solving the small piece first.

04
Spotting patterns

Noticing repetition and using it, rather than treating every step as brand new work.

05
Finding your own mistakes

Reading back what you wrote, locating the step that went wrong, and fixing just that one. Errors become information, not failure.

06
Typing without looking

Once fingers know the keys, attention is freed for the thinking. That is the whole point of the keyboard half.

How to play

  1. Sign in with your own name, so your stars are yours and nobody else's.
  2. Warm up on the keyboard tab. Each colour on the picture of the keyboard is one finger. Put your left fingers on a s d f and your right on j k l ö — the little bumps on f and j help you find home without looking down.
  3. Pick a puzzle and read the yellow hint at the top. It tells you what the robot has to end up doing.
  4. Build the plan, then press Run. Watch the whole thing play out. If it goes wrong, that is normal — that is the game.
  5. Stuck? Press Help me. It never just hands over the answer: first it tells you what is true right now, then which single block to add, and only then does it add one for you.
  6. Collect stars. Three per puzzle. They follow you to any computer you sign in on.

For grown-ups sitting alongside: let them press Run on a plan you can see is wrong. Watching it fail and working out why teaches far more than being corrected first.