Coding skills stopped being necessary just for professional purposes years ago. Instead, having at least some basic coding skills nowadays is considered a core part of people’s digital literacy. And that is set to become even more so in the years to come, when coding skills are expected to be as widely necessary as working with Word or Excel is today.
But what if learning to code is important for a lot of other things as well? What if teaching kids to code is an important and highly effective way to teach them critical thinking, improve their persistence and resilience, enhance their problem-solving abilities, build up their confidence, up their creative thinking, and even improve their emotional development?
If so, teaching kids to code would seem like a crucial tool to not only improve their overall academic growth but also help them grow into more capable, intelligent, and confident people as a whole. And, perhaps even more crucially, it would be a great way to help children who otherwise struggle with more traditional classroom settings to advance at pace as their peers.
But let us stop with the “Ifs” and actually look into why teaching coding to kids is a great way to raise resilient, confident, and capable kids in today’s digital world.
How to teach children to code?
Before we get to the “Why?” let’s explore the “How?” When talking about teaching children to code, we don’t just mean teens and young adults. In fact, children as far as the K-8 age range can be taught the basics of coding in a very effective and fun way, through coding games.
For example, CodeMonkey is a coding course specializing in K-8 kids, in particular. This award-winning course has a variety of coding games meant for any age sub-group in this range and for various skill levels. These coding games don’t just teach programming languages to children either. Instead, they offer child-friendly coding games that help showcase the basic principles of coding the same way a constructor showcases the basic principles of architecture.
These coding games have fun and entertaining graphics and interesting gameplay mechanics to keep kids engaged and entertained, all the while offering progressively increasing skill challenges that ask kids to apply what they have learned so far in new and creative ways.
As children progress through the coding course, school year after school year throughout the K-8 age window, they get to figure out the inner working principles of coding and how it works, as they get ready to delve into actual programming language too.
All the while, however, kids benefit in many other ways that go far and beyond just coding.
Why teaching kids coding is one of the most holistic ways to improve their academic, cognitive, and emotional development?
Teaching kids to code doesn’t just give them one skill. Just like giving a preschooler a constructor to play with doesn’t just teach them how to “work with a constructor,” teaching kids to code does much more than teach them how to “work with code.” Instead, here are some of the major ways in which children can benefit from learning through coding game courses:
Coding is an excellent way to enhance kids’ persistence and resilience
Coding is difficult. And, while kids’ coding games are designed to be fun, engaging, and manageable, they are also made to offer a constantly increasing challenge and difficulty levels that never stop pushing children to try and achieve every given task.
Unlike standard video games that offer minimal challenge and constant dopamine hits, coding games are made to offer a high and ever-increasing challenge with a delayed but very significant gratification in the end. This is one of the best ways to teach kids resilience and persistence, and to combat the constantly growing trend of lacking attention spans and need for immediate gratification.
Coding improves all critical thinking skills
Coding games require logic, that much is clear. But what ought to be considered, too, is that coding games help develop more than just kids’ logical thinking. Instead, good coding game courses help improve all other types of critical thinking too, including structural thinking, algorithmic or computational thinking, pattern-seeking, and other problem-solving skills.
Structural thinking, for example, aka the ability to put unstructured problems into frames to better understand and solve them, is an integral part of any coding game course. Likewise, algorithmic thinking, which is the process of examining complex problems and developing step-by-step solutions that would work for them, is also intrinsically related to coding games.
The combination of such problem-solving and critical thinking skills is one of the main factors that make it so beneficial to teach kids coding through coding games from the earliest possible age.
Coding improves creativity and confidence
People often have the notion that programming teaches logic and the arts teach creativity. Of course, that’s not necessarily true. Instead, it all comes down to how you teach instead of what you teach. Just like many artistic endeavors can help teach logical thinking, coding can foster kids’ creativity when taught correctly.
And well-made coding game courses are one of the best ways to achieve that. Such courses aren’t made to just offer logical questions or force kids to memorize programming terms. Instead, they are designed to push students to look for creative solutions to problems and apply various possible methods for getting through challenges. Other coding games, on the other hand, ask children to build their own structures and even their own games from the ground up, all of which is a fantastic way to improve kids’ creativity, as well as their confidence and self-esteem.
Of course, coding games for kids aren’t a “cure-all” that can magically turn any child into an emotionally intelligent A-grade student who’s ready to tackle any problem in the world with ease. They are just one tool in a tutor’s or a parent’s arsenal to help their children grow as best and as well-developed as possible, and teaching kids coding should also come with the right tutoring, environment, and support.
However, when it comes to classes and courses one should look at to help kids grow into the best students and people they can be, coding games are at the top of the list.
