Coding for 5 year olds

Yesterday I watched a segment on BBC news where they were discussing the introduction of coding to children as young as 5. They had a young boy who was very enthusiastic about writing programs but is it right to put such a focused subject into the curriculum?

It is well accepted that the United Kingdom needs a new generation of IT people but like Art, Science and Philosophy students need to be nurtured into wanting to go into these subjects.

It is important that students of all ages understand what technology is available, what it can do and what they might well expect it to do it the future; so that if they work in any field; they can leverage the technology as much as possible.

If we take something like Word or Excel, we would expect people to cut, paste, create tables or sort and filter data, maybe even use a built in Excel Macro function, but would we expect people to go into Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) and start coding. As a programming professional and veteran of this particular technology I would be really concerned if your average Joe started going under the hood here.

As it was the young boy was actually writing a web page; he was coding it in HTML, but surely using a reasonable design tool at a young age is really all that is needed.

As children move through their education the level of sophistication of use, for example editing HTML and using Style Sheets directly would be appropriate, but also those students who do not want to be coders but want to be engineers building bridges only want to know the technology is available to calculate stress and loading’s. There will of course be those who sit in both camps and the existing systems seem to cater for this. The secondary schools when course choices are presented is still probably the best place for this branching to take place.

Lastly; it is always difficult to decide which languages are used in schools; my daughter uses Python, other schools seem to use whatever they like. Should we not be trying to use industry standard languages (I know it will change) but Java, VB, C#, PHP, SQL etc are the skills the business world needs.

On a lighter note; I hope the coding examples the BBC showed at the time of the interview were not the young boys, the HTML was asking people to put their Hacking tips into his database. I’m sure he has a bright future!!

 

 

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