Teaching Loops and Repeats to Kids

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I am back with another lesson! This time I introduced my kids to the concepts of loops and repeats. I started with drawing monsters on the paper but quickly realized that monsters should not be part of the scenery but a separate cutouts. The separate cutouts gave me the flexibility to add more monsters on the same scenery.

I also made small cutouts for “JUMP” and few numbers which indicated how many time the hero/princess will jump. After that I handed a piece of paper to my kids and asked them to draw any scenery they want. Since, I told them that I have already created some monsters they were more inclined towards creating a scary cave.

The black background is colored by my talented young kids and it represents a cave. The princess is trapped in the cave and she needs to get to the blue diamond. Unfortunately, the 3 monsters are in her way. The only way to get to the diamond is that if she jumps 3 times. Luckily for us we have the JUMP instructions along with the number of times she needs to jump.

I asked my kids to place the instruction and the number of times the princess has to jump the monsters on the sheet. At this point the monsters cutout came in real handy as now I can easily increase the number of monsters in the cave.

Loops and repeating instructions is a complicated topic for kids and definitely needs more lessons to paint the clear picture. In the next lesson I will introduce the concept of looping scope. Stay tuned and happy programming!