REFERRALS
I attended a ZIM workshop to help others having little or no coding experience. We made a colorful game in JavaScript on the Canvas in three hours. ZIM makes creating very visual projects easy yet still keeps the traditional coding structures for transferable skills. There was little to no set-up time, with a cut and paste of the simple template and then right to coding. I would recommend using ZIM for teaching creative coding.
My students explored programming basics and animation in ZIM.
They were engaged, got hands-on experience and had so much fun.
It was a pleasure to see their enthusiasm.
I've heard many positive comments from my students about their learning experience.
It was a fantastic, well organized 75-minute workshop.
I've been involved in a lot of programs to teach kids how to code, and what most successful approaches have in common is a strong visualization element. Kids need to see the effect of the changes they make to constructs like variables, computations and functions. ZIM's focus on creating objects and animations makes it a promising tool for youth tech education, in particular to help bridge the gap from beginner learning technologies like Scratch to a formal programming language like JavaScript.