Top Six Ways to Encourage Kids to Learn Coding

Learn Coding – The Time is Now!

Schools have been canceled indefinitely. However, even though formal schooling has all but stopped for many families, brains still need to expand. Children still require stimulation. Unfortunately for some, the days include the same number of hours that must be filled as they have in the past. How to do so? Get your child to learn coding! Coding is providing your computer instructions in a language it understands so it can achieve a certain outcome. Many people assume it’s only for grownups but that isn’t the case. Children as young as toddlers may learn to code.

In the current digital age, coding has become an important element of learning. Because everything around us is powered by technology, understanding how it works has become critical. To learn coding is a creative process, and children learn to code more rapidly than adults because they have a strong imagination, which is a valuable advantage when it comes to ideating innovative solutions to real-world issues. 

It’s never too early to get your kids to learn coding. While some parents are concerned that their child is too young to touch an iPad, this could be doing them a disservice. Touch screens introduce basic coding concepts such as sequencing and design at the earliest stages.

6 Ways to Spark Interest in Your Child to Learn Coding

Growing up in a digital environment, toddlers need to learn coding just as much as they need to learn to read and do math. Preschool coding exercises can lay the groundwork for children to begin thinking like computer programmers. Here are six recommendations for igniting and maintaining a child’s interest in programming and coding both in and out of the classroom.

Point out the fact that coding equals creativity.

Coding entails as much creativity as it does the math, science, and problem-solving. Many people, including adults and children, are turned off by the reputation of computer programmers as math geeks. However, coding is the process of producing and bringing things to life, such as drawings, games, robots, and apps!

Because most children like creating things, coding will come as readily to them like painting or building with Legos. By stressing creativity, you can pique kids’ attention and teach them some basic programming ideas at the same time. Keep it lighthearted and don’t push it – not all kids enjoy painting, and not all kids will enjoy learning coding.

Exploration should be encouraged.

Find tools that are age-appropriate and allow your child to play without having to read an instruction manual every few minutes. A coder’s universe revolves around the discovery process.

Encourage kids to try new things and keep an eye out for indicators that they’ve reached the app’s boundaries. You can learn along with the rest of the class even if you’re not a developer. To help you get started, some examples of free apps and web resources are Daisy the Dinosaur, Scratch, Hopscotch, and Whitehat Jr. for preschoolers. Alice, Lightbot, and Kodable for pre-teens.

Harness your child’s interests.

Encourage kids to try whatever appeals to them and not dismiss to learn coding entirely if they don’t enjoy it at first. There are applications for everything from art to animation, narrative, and game design. Students may construct robots and write programs to control them using kits such as Lego Mindstorms, Sparki, and littleBits. 

Readers with a passion for books can create websites where they can share their thoughts on the books they’ve read. Sports fans can create websites to keep track of the stats of their favorite players or teams.

Make coding a group activity

Find chances for kids to learn coding as a group. Having a network of friends and classmates who are also interested in coding will help them stay motivated as they mature. Group coding projects promote collaboration and allow kids to learn from one another. You can even have your group of kids engage remotely in an online program with kids from all over the world to get their coding journey started. 

Select a mentor

Seeing a programmer code and sharing their passion is a wonderful approach to get kids interested in programming, but don’t despair if you’re not a programmer yourself! Ask a friend or coworker who codes or works in a technological sector for help, or set up a buddy system and match older students together. In any case, a mentor can help your kids when they run into problems with their programs, encourage them to keep researching and show them what alternative coding professions may entail.

Make problem solving fun

Programmers like problem-solving, and many skilled programmers pick where they work depending on the sorts of issues they’ll be solving. Encourage children to understand how something works and to try new things, or make puzzle games a regular rainy-day pastime. A youngster that likes creative problem solving may become interested to learn coding in the future, even if they are not now.

Conclusion

Introducing kids to coding will offer them a world of possibilities for later in life, not to mention the delight they will derive from having new tools to create with using coding languages. However, keep in mind that coding is not for everyone.

Not every child enjoys painting, baseball, or dancing, and not every youngster will enjoy coding. Don’t push it. Show them the applications, offer some help, and then let them go. If they are not immediately interested, they may return to it later, or may not. Let them explore themselves and see where their interests take them!

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