Should Coding be taught to all Students?

Coding is a new literacy which is becoming more and more integrated into education as a system to not only learn, but create and complete projects. I have created a PowerPoint that outlines what coding is at its core, and some of the benefits and challenges to implementing it into the classroom. I have also shown some ideas and examples of how I would integrate it into my own classroom, as I am personally a secondary science teacher. I also aim to provide context within a Project-based Learning classroom. This link connects you to that PowerPoint. Coding has many benefits as a new form of literacy, and promotes many new thinking and analytical skills within those who learn it.

Within this framework, I want to use this blog post to discuss the my answer to the title question: Yes, all students should learn coding skills. I will go one step further and say coding needs to be implemented into common core as a new literacy that students must learn.

Code.org, an organization that is promoting for the teaching of coding in every school, has put together a slideshow that is free to use that gives quite a number of statistics on why we need to teach coding. The major statistics that stick out from this presentation, are that computer science jobs are the number one new source of income, and that 71 percent of all STEM jobs require coding skills. The fact is that educators are here to train our students for the real world that they will enter. If that is the case, we need to begin making an effort to have coding be taught in all schools. The presentation states that 90 percent of parents want their children to learn coding, but only 40 percent of schools teach it. We are doing a disservice by not teaching these skills to our students.

Mitch Resnick has a great TED talk, about how coding empowers our students to create, and about why we need to begin implementing it into our schools. He comments that our students can use technology, but the next step in literacy is to teach them how to write for technology, which is coding. Just as when you learned to read and write, more learning become open to you, coding is opening up new learning opportunities for our students. This takes form as teaching students computational thinking skills.

In my slideshow at the beginning of this post, I mention computational thinking and its benefits. Computational thinking can drive forward many 21st century classroom skills, such as critical thinking, problem solving, and collaborative skills. Coding is the tool that teaches our students computational thinking, and this type of thinking is becoming essential in more fields than just computer science. In an article for the Guardian, Dan Crow states the following:

“Computational thinking teaches you how to tackle large problems by breaking them down into a sequence of smaller, more manageable problems. It allows you to tackle complex problems in efficient ways that operate at huge scale. It involves creating models of the real world with a suitable level of abstraction, and focus on the most pertinent aspects. It helps you go from specific solutions to general ones.

The applications of this approach stretch beyond writing software. Fields as diverse as mechanical engineering, fluid mechanics, physics, biology, archeology and music are applying the computational approach. In business we are beginning to understand that markets often follow rules that can be discerned using computational analysis.”

We as educators want to be at the forefront of teaching our students how to be best prepared to enter the real world. Coding is becoming an essential skill that promotes many skills, and promotes critical thinking, logical thinking, creativity, and problem solving skills. It empowers students to create and become engaged with the world and devices around them. Most students won’t become computer programmers, but all students benefit from thinking creatively, collaborative skills, problem-solving skills, the ability to connect ideas into a bigger picture, and to think systematically, and coding can be a foundation to teaching our students these skills.