Example buggy recipe for a glass of lemonade: 1. Drink the lemonade. 2. Squeeze a lemon into a glass. 3. Add 10 spoons of sugar. 4. Add water. 5. Stir. (The bugs: drinking first, far too much sugar, and no step to taste it.)
- Ages: 7–12
- Time: 20 minutes
- Skill: Debugging and careful reading
What you need
- A printed or written "buggy" recipe (example below)
- A pencil
- Optional: real ingredients to test the fixed recipe
Step by step
- Read the buggy recipe. Give your child a recipe with hidden mistakes: steps out of order, a missing step, a wrong amount.
- Predict what happens. Ask: if a robot followed this exactly, what would go wrong?
- Find each bug. Circle every mistake.
- Fix the bugs. Rewrite the recipe correctly.
- Test it. If you can, make the recipe together to check the fixes work.
- Write your own buggy recipe. Your child hides bugs in a recipe for you to find.
What your child learns
Debugging: reading carefully, predicting what will happen, finding the error and fixing it calmly. It is the single most useful habit in programming, and in maths and science too.
Enjoyed it? Book a free coding demo class, or see Fun with Coding for year-round coding.
More free activities for kids
- Design a video game on paper: a creative coding activity
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- The 50-word story challenge: a fun writing activity for kids
- Comic strip story: a creative writing activity for kids
- Story dice game: make your own and tell a story
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