Thank you for helping a young person explore coding! Beep & Pixel is a free learning site for children aged about 6 to 12. This page explains how it works, how it keeps children safe, and how you can help.
What’s here
- 60 lessons in six tracks: Unplugged, Block Coding, Python for Kids, Making Games, Robots & Electronics, and How Computers Work. Each lesson lists a suggested age and time.
- Thousands of challenges, each with a separate answer page: mazes, patterns, debugging, binary, turtle drawings, pixel puzzles, secret codes and logic gates.
- Printable PDFs: worksheets and colouring pages for screen-free learning.
- Galleries of art made with code, to spark ideas.
How we keep it safe
- No accounts, sign-ups, comments, forms or chat. Children can’t contact anyone, and nobody can contact them.
- No adverts, no analytics and no tracking. The site loads nothing from other websites.
- Every code sample was run by a computer before it was published, so it works as written.
- Physical activities (like the electronics lessons) use coin-cell or AA batteries only and include safety notes. Please supervise anything with batteries or scissors, and keep button batteries away from younger children and pets.
- The only links to other websites are on this page, for grown-ups.
Read the full Safety & Privacy page for the details.
Getting set up
Unplugged lessons need only paper, pens and household bits. Block-coding lessons work with any free block-based coding app. Python lessons need Python 3 installed on a desktop or laptop computer; it includes an editor called IDLE. Type the code, save the file with any name except turtle.py, and press F5 to run it.
Tips for helping
- Let them drive. Children learn most when their hands are on the keyboard. Ask questions instead of giving answers: “What did you expect to happen? What happened instead?”
- Celebrate bugs. Finding and fixing mistakes is the heart of programming. Model curiosity, not frustration.
- Short and often beats long and rare. Twenty minutes, a few times a week, is plenty.
- Mix screens and paper. The unplugged activities and printables teach the same ideas away from a screen.
- Answers are for checking, not copying. Encourage a real attempt first; the hints help.
For teachers
Lessons are self-contained and can be used in any order within a track, though they’re written to build on each other. Challenges come in five difficulty levels, which makes them handy for early finishers or differentiated practice. Printables can be photocopied freely for your class.
Other places to learn (grown-ups only)
These are well-known, free resources from education organisations. They are other websites with their own privacy rules and, in some cases, accounts and online communities, so please look at them first.
- Python: The official home of the Python language. Download Python here; it includes IDLE, the simple editor our lessons use.
- Scratch: A free block-coding tool from the MIT Media Lab. It has an online community with accounts, so look at its settings and community guidelines together before your child joins.
- CS Unplugged: Free activities that teach computer science without computers, from the University of Canterbury in New Zealand.
- Raspberry Pi Foundation projects: Free, step-by-step coding projects for young people from an educational charity.
- micro:bit: A small programmable board for schools and families, from the Micro:bit Educational Foundation, a not-for-profit.
- Code.org: A non-profit with free coding courses and activities for classrooms.