Everything You Need to Know About Coding For Kids

What do you need to know about coding for kids as we continue our evolution to a digital economy?

There are two ways you can look at an automated future. The first, which the media pushes hard and consequently most people choose to believe, is something straight out of a dystopian novel. In a nutshell, automation will be the biggest killer of good jobs since the Industrial Revolution. Since most jobs will be gone, the jobs that do remain will require new skills and knowledge – skills relevant to a economy dominated by technology.

But there’s another way of looking at it.

We believe that the future is brighter than ever, and will be filled with wonderful opportunities for everyone. By thinking this way, you can set your children—and even yourself—up for success in tomorrow’s world.

But it all starts with laying down the proper groundwork today.  That’s right. The choices you make today will determine how far your children will go in the future. And a great place to start is understanding computers—the heart of the revolution. Though we rely on computers to help us do almost everything, we leave cyber-whizzes and professionals alone to tinker and understand how they function. Here’s why this is wrong. First off, learning how computers work, and how to create programs using them, is easier than it seems. And secondly, computer literacy will be one of the most valuable skills in the future—similar to normal reading and writing today. So it really is invaluable for your children to learn it, and the earlier they start, the better.

Society is increasingly in need of computationally-minded people that can solve complex problems. And the lion’s share of these solutions will be technological in nature.^[1] This means we need the people capable of thinking computationally, capable of coding and programming computers, designing electronic circuitry, and building the technology of the future are the workers that will be in the greatest demand.

To ensure that your child will be capable of filling the coming waves of technological jobs, it’s critical that they learn how to think computationally, and the best way to do this is to teach them to code. Coding computers is something that even young kids can begin to learn, and the process of writing code is a pure expression of computational thinking. In order to write effective code, students need to go through the process detailed earlier so that they can thoroughly understand a problem to instruct the computer on how to work out solutions.

Coding itself will be a highly-marketable skill in the burgeoning information economy. It will be a necessary component of every other industry because increasingly they’re becoming dependent on computers and computing technology. This trend will only continue, so today’s students that learn to code effectively will be tomorrow’s drivers of innovation and economic growth.

UCode has created a number of extremely effective coding classes for kids that introduce computational thinking to kids between the ages of 6 and 16. Children of any age will benefit from learning to think computationally, and the earlier they start, the better. Not only is it fun, it will help them everywhere in school, in life, and will prepare them for a bright future in the high-tech economy.

^[1] “The Impact of Digital Technology on Society and Economic Growth – IMF.” https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2018/06/impact-of-digital-technology-on-economic-growth/muhleisen.htm. Accessed 27 Jul. 2019

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