Raise your hand if you know what those terms mean. OK, now raise your hand if it looks like a foreign language.

All of the terms you see above are various coding languages. Coding, in the simplest of terms, is telling a computer what you want it to do and when.

Learning to code is similar to learning a foreign language, which is easier to do the younger you are. Today we are looking at technologies that are helping young students learn to program and code.

Robo Wunderkind’s programmable bricks are like Legos that teach you how to code

Meet Robo Wunderkind, the Lego-like bricks that teach kids how algorithms and code work.

Robo Wunderkind uses sensors, motors, batteries, circuits and other electronic components embedded in the cubes. Each cube has its own function. There is a battery cube, a microcontroller cube, cubes with motors, a cube containing a Bluetooth module and cubes with sensors. After the cubes are connected, kids use an Android or iOS app to move their creation by dragging and dropping blocks to create simple algorithms, ultimately learning to code.

Jewelbots is a friendship bracelet that teaches girls how to code

Jewelbots—”friendship bracelets for the iPhone era”—are meant to teach girls the basics of coding.

Using basic engineering logic, Jewelbots pair with a mobile app that girls can use to edit the code, making it easy for friends to silently communicate. The open-source jewelry communicates using Bluetooth.

10 educational tools to teach kids the basics of programming

Programming and coding skills are in high demand in the job market, and the need doesn’t appear to be going away anytime soon.

This article shares 10 educational tools that can be used to teach and develop programing skills in kids. Most of the listed tools are based on a visual programming language, which has a drag and drop interface for programming. These colorful and engaging tools will ultimately help build programming and coding skills.

What did we miss? Share links to your favorite innovative finds in the comment section below and don’t forget to check out last week’s Innovation Friday.

Disclosure: Lexmark is not endorsing any products or features shared in this Innovation Friday blog post. It’s just stuff we think is really, really cool and innovative.