Catch them Young: A Short Plea for Programming at an Early Age.

At any given moment and any given location in this world, a quick glance around you will undoubtedly show at least one aspect which has been affected by technology. To be rather specific: affected by software. Even if it were the groceries you just paid for (by card), the carefully calculated flight path of an airplane flying over, or the fading EDM music playing in the background: if it wasn’t for software, our world would be a completely different place.

And although arguably software could be used for doing bad as well as good, one can not go around the fact that software plays an important role in our society. And this is not new. We’ve seen throughout history before that certain disciplines played a growing part in our lives over time. There was a time in which religion was not that important, after which it became a guiding discipline. There has been a period in which calculus wasn’t that big of a deal, now, it unmistakably is the most important pillar of modern science. Understanding physics has been neglected for a long time, but nowadays you can’t get around it. And every-time something became “a thing” in our lives there was always one (logical) thing we’d done: pass it down to the youngsters of that generation. In this plea I argue why we feel that we are on the verge of changing again: programming deserves to be passed down as well (as a standard part of the curriculums in high school courses).

Code is a universal language: teach children to write too

The language behind programming languages is universal: it’s logic. It is logic which forms a gateway to all the other people on this earth. Children, starting from very young ages, grasp this concept. How many kids have you met who clearly are more digitally skilled than you are? You could say that the children of today are digital natives… Well, actually, not quite yet. Although they seem to understand technology perfectly, most of them aren’t able to create (creative) technology. It is if they can read, but not write. (Mitch Resnick, MIT Media Lab).

It is imperative that we give our children the toolkit to be able to participate in shaping the world as well, rather than only consuming of it. We should enable them to create and express themselves in new technologies through coding.

Preparation of the future

If you are stuck in the mindset of previous generations and just desire your children to have good job perspectives: this in itself is a perfectly valid reason as well! Almost all employers require their employees to have fluent digital skills. This doesn’t necessarily mean that one should be able to write a script, but believe me when I say that it makes everything a hell of a lot easier.

As a teenager, in high school, this one time we had to solve the same math problem over and over again (I believe it was as simple as calculating the surface of figures). I figured that investing time in a simple program to calculate it for me, would give me loads of spare time (which I again could spend on programming websites for the neighborhood butcher). To date, in our company, we all share this mindset. If you have to do a task twice: consider automating it. If you have to do it three times: definitely automate it.

Regardless of the branch you’ll be working in: programming will prove to be a useful tool.

Learning-by-doing (trial and error)

A large part of coding, and learning to code, is just doing it. Try, fail, try, succeed. As with many things in life, we learn by trying and we learn from our mistakes.

Our society to date is shaped in such a way that children fear “doing the wrong thing”. This is dangerous. Being afraid of failing can be lead to a burn-out and an unhappy life. We should always tell our children to just try, and figure it out. Not every step along the way has to be a disruptive one. Not everything you do has to be great.

Learning to program thought me this mindset, which helped me to understand bigger challenges (“the real-life ones”) as well. I learned that failing isn’t the end but simply means that I’m great on track. Of course, many teachers, self-help books, etc. will tell you this; but learning to code is a process in which you experience this firsthand.

Wrapping it up

Today’s world required our next of kin to be able to code. Not for the sake of programming itself, but for its implications. Children will understand the world, which they intensively use, better and will be enabled to create and shape it as well. Children will be preparing for the future, for being able to write simple scripts eases work. Children will acquire the skill of computational thinking, which again, helps them to gain a better understanding of the world. And lastly: children will allow themselves to fail.

We do not settle for pretty words. This article explains our motivation for setting up CodeSkillz. A (Dutch) social enterprise with the mission: bringing 21st-century skills to high schools in the Netherlands. I won’t decrease the value of this article by promoting this concept further, so for more information, click away!