There has been a flurry of activity over the last year and a half with regards to the upskilling of kids for the all important subject of coding (or programming, if you're old school). If you are on social media, and have kids, you have likely been bombarded with ads touting coding as the next best thing since sliced bread. Parents are not entirely wrong in being concerned about the hype and hoopla behind a skill that promises to propel your child into the metaverse where all great things happen - your child could startup the next unicorn, they’d be the next CEO of Google, or be on the next spaceship to Mars!
While all of the above are certainly plausible, they are not the sole reason why your kid should learn to code - or in simple terms, be able to talk to a computer. Coding, for the uninitiated, is a script that computers understand. Think about it this way - if you were to visit a remote African village, the chances of you being able to communicate with the locals would be much higher if you spoke the local language, than if you spoke English. Similarly, to be able to talk to a computer you need to know one of the languages that a computer understands. You may have heard of these languages: Python, C++, Java, Scratch, etc. Just as you have different natural languages like English, Hindi, Japanese, Afrikaans, which each have a different script and grammar, there are also computer languages with different grammars (called syntax in computing parlance). To know a computer language you have to learn its syntax.
But why should your child learn to talk to a computer in the first place, you may ask? Why should they learn a computer language if they are not going to become a software engineer? Why should they learn to code if their career path has nothing to do with computers? What if they choose to become artists, sportspersons, or politicians?
Here’s why we think that every child should learn to code or program.
Coding is a skill used not only by software engineers but by people in all professions. If you were a Financial Analyst crunching out Excel spreadsheets day in and day out, your tasks could be automated with the use of Excel formulas. Formulas in Excel are nothing but code in a language that Excel understands. There is a misconception that coding is used only by software engineers. Software Engineers no doubt use code, but the code they write is typically to build products. So, for example, the software Microsoft Excel itself would have been built by software engineers at Microsoft. But users of Excel, like our Financial Analyst above, would still benefit from learning to code.
The second reason we think that children should learn coding is that there is a much larger (and possibly more important) skill that children acquire when they learn to code. They learn the art of Computational Thinking. Computational Thinking is a term used to describe problem solving abilities that involve large amounts of data. And these types of scenarios with large amounts of data are becoming more and more common, because data is becoming cheap and readily available. That is why “data is the new gold”! Imagine the meteorologist who deals with hourly weather patterns and collects huge amounts of data. The patterns in this data collected over several years can be used to predict future events - like a severe cyclone that might hit a certain city. How do meteorologists put all this data together and make sense out of it? Simple. Use computing power to find patterns in the data. To build this model though, our meteorologist must know the skill of computational thinking. Learn more about computational thinking here in our earlier blog.
The third reason we think that children should learn coding is that coding is a critical component of innovation. Most of the new startups that are being built today are utilizing technology to reach their audiences. Whether you are a sportsperson starting a business, or a social entrepreneur, knowing coding and technology will help you scale your business to reach millions. Even if you, as an artist, need to make your art popular on a platform like Facebook where you wish to run promotions, you would be better off knowing how to code, rather than not knowing it.
If you still think that coding is not really important for your child, you may note that the government too thinks that coding and computational thinking are skills that all children must acquire. The National Education Policy 2020 includes these skills as part of the school curriculum. In other words, these skills are as important as Math and Science.
Our final thought on why every child should learn coding. Its fun! You could get addicted to it. And it's certainly a better utilization of your child’s screen time than playing video games!
