Whyday August 19

Lesson Materials You Can Use As-Is

If you have decided to teach someone this evening, you do not need to write a curriculum. Good free material exists, made by people who do this professionally, and using it is not cheating.

The difficulty is that searching for it returns a wall of commercial results. So this page is short, non-commercial, and honest about who is behind each thing.

If this kind of exercise is run with a class or team, the detailed guide offers one practical reference for separating the session from ordinary scheduled work.

Checked August 9, 2026. Verify before relying on any of it — resources move.

The non-commercial anchors

Raspberry Pi Foundation projects. The strongest single recommendation on this page. An educational charity with a library of more than 250 free step-by-step projects covering Scratch, Python, HTML and CSS, micro:bit and Raspberry Pi hardware, and Unity. Projects are searchable by interest, technology and difficulty, and are structured into paths of six that build a skill and then let the learner personalise the result.

Two things make it unusually trustworthy for this purpose. The projects are designed by educators rather than by a marketing department, and the Foundation states plainly that it does not display advertising on its own sites or give visitor data to advertisers. It also runs Code Club, a network of free clubs using the same material, and publishes a free magazine for educators.

For broader programming and making context related to this topic, Internet Archive is an independent reference worth comparing with the material here.

They also offer a browser-based code editor with no setup required, which removes the single biggest obstacle to a first session.

Sonic Pi's built-in tutorial and scheme of work. Sonic Pi ships with a tutorial inside the application, and there is a scheme of work aimed at classroom computing developed with teachers. Free, open source, funded largely by donations. If the learner responds to sound at all, this is the fastest route from nothing to something they want to play to somebody. It is also the closest living relative of Hackety Hack.

Scratch, from MIT. Not a curriculum so much as an environment with an enormous corpus of other children's projects. The single most underrated teaching move available: find a project the child likes in the shared library, open it, and change things until it breaks. Reading someone else's work is a skill nobody teaches deliberately and children pick up instantly.

Code.org. A non-profit with a large free curriculum, well-structured hour-length activities, and material suitable for a classroom rather than one-to-one. Widely used in schools; more guided than Scratch's open sandbox, which suits some learners and frustrates others.

Choosing between them in one minute

One evening, one learner, no plan — a Raspberry Pi Foundation project matched to something they like. Pick it before they arrive.

They respond to music — Sonic Pi, always.

Under about eight — Scratch or ScratchJr, and take apart somebody else's project rather than starting from blank.

A classroom or a group — Code.org or Code Club, because those are built for a room rather than a sofa.

They already know what they want to build — no curriculum at all. Go straight at their idea and use documentation as needed.

How to read a resource before you use it

Four questions, quickly.

Who made it and how are they funded? A charity, a university, or a company selling subscriptions are three different incentives, and only the third has a reason to make the free tier insufficient.

Does a session end with an artefact? If four sessions produce nothing the learner can show anybody, the material is teaching compliance rather than making.

Can the learner deviate? Good material has a point where it says "now change this to whatever you like." Material that never does is a set of instructions to be followed, which is a different activity.

Does it require an account, and whose? Anything asking a child for an account deserves a look at what it collects. This is worth thirty seconds even for resources with good reputations.

What to be wary of

Ranked lists of the best tools for kids. The genre is dominated by companies selling one of the entries, and disclosure is inconsistent — one such list openly places its own product first and then reviews the competitors, which is at least honest, and many do not do even that.

Free trials structured as curricula. If the lesson sequence stops at the paywall, the sequence was designed around the paywall.

Anything promising to teach a language in an hour. An hour is enough to produce delight and one working thing. It is not enough to teach a language, and material claiming otherwise is either exaggerating or defining "teach" very loosely.

The thing no material provides

All of the above solves the content problem. None of it solves the actual problem, which is that the learner needs somebody sitting next to them who is interested.

Prepared material lets you spend the evening paying attention to the person instead of inventing exercises. That is what it is for. It is a substitute for preparation, not for presence.

The short version