Product Review of Move the Turtle: Learn to Code

Move the Turtle app, available for iPhone and iPad, will bring the world of computer science to your kids at an early age, giving them a serious edge. With easy-to-understand, step-by-step directions, kids will learn the concepts of programming, loops, procedures, variables, and conditional instructions. They will learn in a colorful and visually stimulating environment, all from a cute, friendly turtle.
Website: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id509013878
What Users Love About the App
“Brilliant kids programming game. I especially like the Angry Birds style levels! I run a programming club for six 9-year-old boys and they all loved it.”
“What a wonderful app. My 4yo would be considered too young according to the description, but I was extremely surprised to see how quickly she picked up on some of the core concepts (move, pen up, pen down, colors, angle, sound).”
“As someone for whom learning various programming languages (Visual Basic, JavaScript, PHP) has been a struggle, I found this app very helpful in the way it steps you through creating simple programming routines and concepts. The ability to drag & drop functions make it very accessible for anyone to start experimenting with creating simple programs.”
“Great teaching app. This is great teaching at four beginnings of all ages. My grandchildren wrote their first cold, is it? I also have an elder in his 50s who wrote his first coat with it. I highly recommend.”
“This is a clever UI atop good ol’ turtle graphics! Very well done, simple, touch-friendly editor. Nice job burying, but allowing, advanced features.”
What Users Dislike About the App
“Overall, this is a good app for teaching lower and middle school kids to code, but there are free apps that do the same. While LOGO may not be the best language, to begin with, it gets kids thinking about processes.”
“Some of the directions are confusing. With more detailed directions explaining cause and effect, this would be 5 stars for me. For example, why does the turtle need to change colors to achieve a goal? The app says that there is a problem that needs to be solved, but as a user, it doesn’t seem that way. Some of these details seem counterintuitive, but not so much that I wouldn’t try this with a group of kids.”
“There doesn’t seem to be any sound, which is a serious lack. There are bugs in the levels, the difficulty progresses far too quickly, and there is no way to design custom levels.”
“The lack of sound means that the player needs to be able to read at about a 2nd-grade level. Some of the controls are not intuitive, like how to reorder the tasks. This has the potential to be really good for 4-6-year-olds, but you need to address the lack of sound-based instructions AND more intuitive UI.”
“If you have a couple of average kiddos at or in pre-K, this app is not for you. I had to take a few hours to go thru the tutorial and found it very challenging for me (42 YOA). I suppose it would be good for a high school or college kid trying to get their feet wet.”