Coding for Kids
5 Reasons Why Kids Should Learn to Code
As the world moves towards digitalization, coding or
programming will be one of the most important and in demand job skills in the
near future. Coding today is not restricted to just the technology domain.
Whether it is finance, manufacturing, aviation, healthcare, retail, telecom, pharma,
real estate, entertainment, media and social media, there are job openings for
programming in all these domains. To prepare your children for this highly
valued and lucrative career option and for their holistic development, it is
highly recommended that we plan t Here are 5 reasons why
kids should learn to code:
1. Strengthen their trouble-shooting skills
One of the most important life skills that coding teaches is
problem-solving. Sometimes the programming works and at other times it requires
corrections to serve the intended purpose. This helps them imbibe the important
skill of first understanding and then trouble-shooting issues without getting
deterred by challenges. Finding a viable solution to a problem adds a ‘feel
good factor’ and helps strengthen their confidence and computational thinking skills.
Tip for Parents:
Appreciate and encourage your child’s coding effort and help her/him explore
online reference resources about coding for kids (Coding literature/blogs by
experts/podcasts/articles/videos) to educate them further.
2. Enhance creativity
When children write programs, it enhances their ability to
think out-of-box and gives a much-needed boost to their creativity. They must
think about the end result to be achieved through their coding and reverse
engineer the steps accordingly. It helps them to imagine how the entire process
will unfold and offer creative solutions to address the problem at hand.
Tip for Parents: Explain the
problem to them and guide them in a step-wise manner about solving it through
coding.
3. Encourage logical & algorithmic
thinking
Coding encourages your kid’s structural and algorithmic thinking
in terms of important concepts like repetition, sequencing and conditional
logic. This helps to improve their performance in maths by getting them hooked
to the subject, by engaging them in an interesting manner and developing their
algorithmic thinking. This kind of heuristic
and structured approach will evolve their perspective of looking at things in a
logical way.
Tip for Parents: Use
online websites like Code Combat, Tynker, Khan Academy, Code Monster, Thimble, for valuable
resources about programming for children, to help your child learn and practice
coding in an easy manner.
4. Inculcate grit and resilience
While coding, your children experiment with the coding. They
try, they fail, and continue to try again till they are successful. They learn
the valuable life skill of being persistent and resilient at what they do. De-bugging
the developed code is one such challenging and exciting task, which often tests
their resilience and trains them to continue their efforts even after repeated
failed attempts.
Tip for Parents: Try to
encourage and guide the kids to continue their coding efforts even if they face
road blocks. Help them or ask them to
take help of their teachers, mentors and friends – anyone with some experience
of coding for kids. This will teach them about ‘FINISHING’ the things that they
start without ‘GIVING UP’.
5. Continuous improvement
Coding helps children to learn a valuable life lesson of
continuous improvement, which will add value to both their personal and
professional lives. For example, if the children are making an app for recycling
of paper in their class. Before they
start the coding, a lot of research and background work related to data
collation, existing solutions and why they are redundant, the problems that the
teacher is facing with the current processes is to be undertaken. This will help them improve the current
processes or design new ones through real-world application of coding, math
and logic to provide viable solutions.
Tip for Parents: A key
aspect of encouraging programming for kids is to answer all their queries – however
insignificant or otherwise - about the subject. Such type of structural
thinking will help them to boost their ability to challenge the current
‘solutions’ and come up with better ‘thought provoking’ ideas.
Today’s kids will be facing highly competitive working
environments tomorrow. They have to be well prepared and equipped with
essential life and job skills to not just survive but thrive amongst tough
competition. Coding helps to shape up your kid’s critical personal and professional
skills like effective communication, accurate decision making, problem solving,
team work, initiative taking, etc. Apart from this, we strongly recommend that taking
your children to witness live hackathons and watching others solve coding
problems can help in expanding their knowledge about programming.
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