One of the most enriching experiences of being a human-being is to create something new with your bare hands. There is happiness in creating something new – it can be planting a small plant or sketching something. Coding is one such opportunity for children today – an opportunity to create, explore, and solve problems. Getting kids into coding as early as possible will help them in their growing years; coding involves both the left brain and right brain activity, which reaps a lot of benefits in the long run.
Coding is fundamentally nothing but creativity and problem-solving. These are traits that should be inculcated at a very young age in every kid. Yes, we do teach other subjects like Mathematics to achieve the same goal. But no other subject actually has the power to inculcate creativity and problem-solving with immediate output better than coding. Coding brings together imagination, logic, problem-solving, mathematics, art, creativity, and language to one practical application that the kid uses to build something of their own creation. Best of all, coding also teaches kids that it is okay if you don’t get things right the first time.
Here is a list of skills that children develop while learning coding:
- To apply mathematics and logic in real-life problems
- To learn to create things and to solve difficult problems
- To persist, iterate and improve
- Algorithmic thinking
- Critical thinking
- Attention to detail and debugging the problem to find a solution
- Creativity and Expression
- Iterative problem-solving
Where do you start?
Most parents would have a confusion on how to start their kids on coding and whether to start with Scratch or Python or JavaScript. Well, at UnicMinds, we simplified it completely.
Firstly, the younger kids will need to be introduced to drag and drop, block based and UI-based coding first. The drag-and-drop interface teaches kids the principles of construction, flow, data types, variables, and thinking in a logical sequence to solve problems.
As they get comfortable with basic coding blocks and understand the nuances, start with a simple programming language like JavaScript or Python. Both these are very good introductory programming languages. Python is especially good because it is one language that is used very extensively everywhere by industry and by academicians. The language teaches good principles of coding such as indentation, syntax, and readable code. Students can finish with a decent project like a simulation game of alien invasion.
In the next phase of graduating to a higher level, begin with a strongly typed language like C++ which is more complex, and start the process of learning coding with low-level languages. Or advance more into the current course of Python and work on slightly more complex projects involving multiple ranges of data. This gives a complete idea to kids which in turn enables them to spin-off into any level of coding with both low-level and high-level languages.
Refer this post backed by research 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.
In the past few years, the world has achieved something remarkable by breaking the barrier for coding that only grownups with significant mathematics exposure could do. Now, coding can be learned and applied by even kids. This break-through was led by a paradigm shift in 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 quicker way than how people used to learn 20 years back. This is also one of the reasons why kids today can do all the stuff that only grownups could do in their twenties a few years back.
In Coding, kids get an immediate reward in simultaneously witnessing the output of 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 and approaching problem-solving in a logical manner with first principles is what kids will learn. Today, coding is as essential as Maths and English for kids. There is no debate about it anymore. We live in an age where technology plays a role in everything that we do, and the future is going to be more and more of it. Therefore, all countries are teaching coding to kids across the globe, and it is deemed an absolute mandatory course for kids across schools in the developed and the developing world as part of the STEM.
At UnicMinds, we have a tailor-made path for each student based on their individual stage of learning and learning type. We have the most comprehensive range of coding courses for kids with a clear path from beginner to advanced levels.
Enrol your kids in the best 1:1 coding classes.
Hope this is useful, thank you.