Why learning coding matters for kids?

Learning coding has never been easier! There are multiple resources to learn coding from self-learning videos and forums to 1:1 classes and gamified learning. However, the first question – do kids really need to know coding?

Well, coding is as essential as Maths and English for kids. There is no debate about it now anymore. While Maths is undoubtedly the bedrock of analytical thinking and logic building, Coding is the biggest skill that helps kids to apply mathematics, logic and sequence to solve problems and bring out their best creations in a real applied way. Often in Mathematics, you cannot see the result of what you’re learning immediately. In Coding, kids get an immediate reward in seeing what they’re building and that reinforces them to do more. At the core, coding is essentially mathematics in an applied manner. So building something by typing on a laptop is something and approaching problem-solving in a logical manner with first principles is what kids will learn.

From this vantage point, coding is an absolutely important subject, just as essential as Mathematics, arts, science, and sports. In fact, in many countries such as China, UK and the US, it is mandatory for every kid to learn coding in pre-school along with Language and Mathematics. Developmentally, coding is a process of giving a set of instructions so that the computer understands and processes the same. Kids learn the same thing at a young age by developing games and story-based teaching that is easier for kids to grasp than the text-based terminals that adults use for large-scale application development. Nevertheless, the fundamentals are the same, and kids learning coding at a young age can open a plethora of opportunities for both kids and also for society.

Here is a list of skills that kids learn while learning to code:

  1. To use Mathematics and logic in real-life problems
  2. To learn to create things and to solve difficult problems
  3. To persist, iterate and improve
  4. Algorithmic thinking
  5. Critical thinking
  6. Attention to detail and debugging the problem to find a solution
  7. Creativity and Expression

Teaching coding to kids is a progressive shift in society to build future humanity, which is more informed and comfortable around how things work. We live in an age where technology plays a role in everything that we do, and the future is going to be more of it. Therefore, all countries are teaching coding to kids across the globe, and it is deemed an absolutely essential course for kids now everywhere.

I am genuinely convinced that coding is not being pushed on kids at a young age. We’ve achieved something remarkable by breaking the barrier that only grownups with significant mathematics exposure can learn to code. Coding can be learned and applied by kids. A substantial change also led to how we program today compared to 10-20 years ago. Earlier, many programming languages were terminal-based, complex syntax oriented, and needed a significant understanding of the platform. Today, with the advent of simpler programming languages like Python and block-based coding, children can learn crucial logic-based programming by leaving the heavy-duty not so immediately relevant stuff such as syntax. This is like learning coding in a much simpler and more optimised way than how people used to learn 20 years back. This is also one of the reasons why kids today can do stuff that only and only grownups used to do in their 20s a few years back.

Therefore, let’s not doubt this revolution anymore and let our kids freely learn from Coding Classes in USA for Kids and be highly literate in the process of building stuff via software and hardware. Because there are not many things in this world that give a person as much happiness and satisfaction as building things that make something better, it allows the wonder in the kid to be nurtured and brought to reality. It will enable kids to learn much more about “how things work” and be a part of the design and development of building things from a young age.

The best 1:1 Coding Websites for Kids that are not over-commercial like Whitehat Jr. across the world are:

  1. Code.org
  2. UnicMinds Coding Classes for Kids
  3. Juni Learning for Kids
  4. Funtech Kids
  5. Kidocode

You’ll be surprised how much kids are changing by learning coding. Their perspectives are changing about the world – how they look at a TV or a GPS in a car is changing as they develop an understanding of computing and programming early.

Refer this research post from University of Washington on how does a child’s perception of machine intelligence change after learning coding and how coding is helping as an applicative complimentary subject for logic based work.

Hope this is useful, thank you.

As a parent, if you’re confused about where should your kid start, then please refer the below:

Should my child start with Scratch or Python or JavaScript?

Coding competitions for Kids

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