There is a lot of buzz about how your child should learn to code.
Last year alone, over 100 millions kids started to learn coding.
Is it a giant fad or a fundamental shift in what our children need for them to thrive in the digital world?
Is it a specialized skill like gymnastics, skating, etc., or is it a foundational skill like reading, writing and arithmetic?
What are the benefits of a learning to code? How does it help raise academic and career success?
How do you get your child started learning to code?
“Everybody in this country should learn how to program a computer, because it teaches you how to think.” – Steve Jobs
From celebrities and educators, people from every walk of life are taking a look at why kids should learn code. Coding boot camps are popping up all over the place, offering adults the promise of a career transition into a lucrative field. A growing number of online code academies are offering self-guided courses.
Khan Academy is promoting its “Hour of Code”, and programs like Scratch are introducing the basic concepts of coding to primary kids. What’s up with all the hype? Is it just about filling millions of jobs that economists fear will go unfilled at some point in the future? What if my child doesn’t want to be a software engineer? Should she still learn to code?
Learning to code is about more than filling jobs. Coding can be a lucrative career path, but it certainly isn’t a career path that everyone should choose. Many children are passionate about other things, and every job in the future isn’t going to feature side-by-side monitors displaying lines of Javascript.
Like Steve Jobs said, coding teaches kids how to think. Learning to code teaches kids how to take a big-picture problem, break it into smaller chunks, form a plan, execute the plan, learn from your mistakes, fix them, complete the task, and have something to show for it. Problem solving and project management play a part in everyone’s job and in everyone’s life in general!
Children’s brains are literally growing. They are rapidly developing new cells, new pathways, and new abilities as children approach adulthood. If children learn to code, it will help their brains develop pathways and neurons that will benefit them for the rest of their lives.
Coding Improves Student Performance In All Subjects
The principles and practices of coding help kids in every academic area. Some connections, for instance math, are more obvious, but coding skills touch on every academic arena. Let’s start with the one most people think of: math. Math involves precise logic. If I add this number to this number and then I divide the sum by this number, I get this other number. Many aspects of coding are logic in its purest form.
The coder is telling the computer, “If I do this, I want you to do this and this. If the user clicks this button before filling in these boxes, then show him an error message. If the user scrolls down on this page, shrink the navigation menu while keeping it pinned to the top as they scroll.” In some cases, coding involves actual math, but in most cases, coding is really just a series of “if-then” scenarios tied to certain actions and conditions.
Many of us remember PEMDAS, one of the most popular ways to remember the order in which to solve a multi-step equation. Coding often behaves the same way, prioritizing certain actions ahead of others, and making sure that the correct order is maintained.
So, coding obviously connects to math class, but what could it have to do with painting? Or ath