About Code Blocks

Free coding for kids — learn programming with visual drag-and-drop blocks. Build programs with loops, conditionals, and variables. Ages 6-12. No ads, no sign-up.

How to use

1. Tap an action button — Forward, Back, Left 45°, Right 45°, or 90° turns — and the turtle moves immediately on the canvas while the step is recorded into the program bar at the bottom.
2. Choose your distance (10, 20, 40, or 80 pixels) before moving. Smaller steps are great for K-Gr1 fine-motor learners; bigger steps let older kids draw faster and cover more screen.
3. Use the Pen Down/Up button to lift the turtle when you want to move without drawing — this teaches the same conditional logic concept used in Scratch and Logo (the language Code Turtle is built on, designed by Seymour Papert in 1967).
4. Tap Color to pick from 9 swatches and draw multi-color shapes. This sneaks in computational thinking: kids learn that programs are made of small, ordered steps that produce a visible result.
5. Try a preset — Square, Triangle, Star, or Spiral — to see a finished program load instantly. Watching it run helps kids reverse-engineer 'how did the computer make a star?' which builds debugging intuition before they hit real code.
6. Hit Replay to watch your whole program run again from a blank canvas, or Undo to remove the last step. This is a forgiving sandbox — there's no 'wrong' program, which is key for the productive-failure model used in Hour of Code.
7. Teacher tip: pair Code Turtle with a paper grid for ages 5-7 — kids predict the shape on paper, then verify on screen. Aligns with CSTA K-2 standard 1A-AP-10 (model the way programs store and manipulate data) and Common Core math practice MP1 (make sense of problems).

Frequently asked questions

Part of ToolFluency’s library of free online tools for Kids. No account needed, no data leaves your device.