“Idit Harel (Twitter: @Idit) got something of a hostile reception when she announced to a room full of social entrepreneurs that it is necessary to teach kids in poor countries to code. ‘Coding is the new writing,’” she said. http://www.scidev.net/global/education/scidev-net-at-large/teach-poor-kids-code-writing.html You agree?
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I’ve tried learning to code. Many Many Many Times. It’s hard. I have work to do and all. Plus there’s always some NEW thing to learn.
Should we all learn how to code? I don’t know oooooo! I’m afraid that if I don’t learn, I might be obsolete soon. But it’s sooooooo hard! Ugh!
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We can teach kids “surface-level” coding. What I mean by this is giving them a subtle introduction. This helps with good logic reasoning and approach to problem solving. In the deeper sense of things however, we can’t all learn to code. Coding is a profession and its ever evolving. It needs to be your “work” for you to be able to keep up with the rapid changes. Plus some people are just better at other things - human behavior psychology, user experience analysis, data mining, analysis and visualization, project management, product development, user interface design, etc. There are just a whole lot of other things that make up tech and “apps” beyond coding.
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I have to say that I agree with @kehers. Which brings me to the issue of full-stack startups that @onyeka and @xolubi were raising. If you say Coding is Work, doesn’t it make sense that this One Size Fits All Coder is a myth?
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Should we teach kids how to code? Certainly! Just as how you expect anyone who’s literate to read and write. Does it mean everyone who’s literate is a good writer? Certainly not. In the society of the future, preliminary coding skills would be as important as learning to read and write. That doesn’t mean everyone would be able to write code for operating systems - heck I’m a programmer and I can’t write code for an operating system even if my life depended on it.
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Couldn’t agree more. The person quoted in the article I linked to goes a step further. She contends that learning how to read, write and do math is not a prerequisite for kids using technology.
She says: “‘People assume that you have to have the 3Rs [reading, writing and arithmetic] before you get to what I call the 3Xs: exploration, exchange and expression,’” Harel said. “‘But that’s not the case.’”
“The firm gets children to play computer games before showing them how to begin modifying the game — for example changing the colours on their character — using computer code. Often the kids can’t read well, if at all, Harel explained, but they get engrossed in tinkering with the game world and, in the process, they begin to pick up more traditional literacy, too.”
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This is one of the reasons why Scratch is such a good beginner programming language.
Pretty sure I didn’t comment on that topic. As someone who these days is edging ever so slightly towards a full-stack definition due to sheer necessity, I’m not so sure I get people’s beef with someone being able to work across different fields… but that’s by the way.
Regarding this topic, I’m on the fence. I guess it depends on what you mean when you say it. Someone mentioned on Twitter that everyone should learn to code… actually I think Seyi was the one that said it. I disagree. Like kehers said, I feel like teaching enough for kids to gain an understanding and appreciation of the devices they use is what’s most crucial, because it’s so broad. As they go along the system, they can do more/specialize.
I’m also reluctant to equate coding with things like learning to write/read/do basic math just because of how much more likely it is that I’ll need to read something than it is I’ll need to do any coding, ever. I can get by without knowing how to code. I can’t do any half-decent job as a total illiterate.
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I totally agree with @kehers & @takinbo. The nuances of different kinds of coding are for those who are specialised in them, but the basics are important for logic & problem solving skills.
I remember doing a very basic digital logic topic in Further Mathematics in secondary school & how it helped me reason. I think all those little things contributed to easily picking up the skills.
Scratch would definitely be great for kids too. It’s visual, which is actually the next frontier in learning.
So I will start off by saying I think that coding is the new writing.
I think there are three camps to this statement. There are the people that agree to this statement, there are the ones that say “Yes (to an extent) this is important but it cannot be ubiquitous like writing” and the ones that are like hell no, “This is like comparing apples an oranges”.
The camp that thinks, coding is important but everyone cannot be a coder. Humor me for a minute and try this perspective. Coding gets easier every year. The barrier of entry reduces and the public is generally more educated world wide about what a programmer does, everyone has watched the social network and kinda has a vague picture of what you mean when you say you are coding. There are more tutorials than ever before, there are more libraries than ever before and there are more frameworks springing up everyday that teach you how to make a To-do list in 5 minutes. I remember when CakePHP used to promise me a blog in 30 minutes (an that was amazing). So let us say this keeps reducing year over year, one day there will be a framework that allows us to create a to-do list in 30 seconds. I try to imagine how easy things will be then. How many layers of things we deal with today that will be abstracted away. So if we think of the future of programming and not what we do today. I do think we are converging to a time where everyone can code.
There will still be the professional coders, that will never go away. Thats the same as how we can all read and write but there are still renowned authors and there are still newspaper or magazine columnists. There will always be the professionals.
For people that feel it is comparing apples to oranges. What if we thought of programming not as typing on a keyboard but as giving computers instructions. We code by typing today because it is the most efficient way to give a computer low level instructions. What if we had another interface to do this? What if you could use your voice. Accept my craziness for second, but is there a difference between Coding on a keyboard and talking to Siri? The aim of both actions is to give a machine an instruction, it processes it and gives a result. I am not of the school of thought that coding is only “authentic” when done on a low level. So considering that coding is just giving instructions to a machine and that the future of easier coding is coming, does it seem insane that this would be an essential skill for life one day (giving machines instructions to process)?
I only think the disagreements on this topic is because we evaluate that statement “Coding is the new writing” with evidence of how we code today but not how we might code tomorrow. Once we add that to the equation I think the possibility opens up. Sorry for my essay.
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I believe that coding is the literacy of the future and I encourage every young person to embrace any opportunity that comes his or her way to gain this knowledge. You certainly do not need to be an expert or a professional; the knowledge will profit you in business and your career.
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Surprised no one is talking about the one lopsidedness of this logical thinking. I learn a lot on analytical thinking by studying for Verbal on the GREs and i think we need more of these than logical thinking. Logic is too str8 forward, but then i am biased toward this, coming from one side as well.
Approach it from this angle;
- What do I want to be able to do?
- What do I need to know to do that?
- Learn just that
We get overwhelmed by the skills demonstrated by others and the sheer amount of knowledge out there
My daughter is 6 years old and they are teaching her if/else conditions and do/while loops as part of arithmetic in her school. Even her mum is confused most of the time but I am impressed how my daughter that struggles with 5times table easily understand the basic concepts of algorithms. I think this is what people means by teaching kids “coding”. Programming languages comes and goes but understanding algorithms is what is important. Oh by the way, she wants to be lawyer when she grows up 
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Yours truly @lordbanks. The basic truth is that a knowledge on coding/programming helps you understand the world around.
I had written an article before this thread “Why I think every child should learn how to code”
This is also absolutely correct. For me a basic knowledge is key just like I wrote in this piece on my blog
“Just as we want them to express themselves clearly through writing, or contextualize the world through geography and develop numeracy through mathematics, we need to give them an opportunity to understand tools that will help them grasp the accelerating nature of technology.”
http://dkdimgba.com/my-passion-why-i-think-every-child-should-learn-code/
#LatePost: This gives me so much joy, reading this. Working with some friends to bring basic algorithm learning to schools’ curriculum, at grassroots level. Kudos to your daughter’s school, the teachers and, especially, you.