The Value of Coding in the Classroom
The value of teaching students to code isn’t about preparing them for jobs as programmers, it is about so much more.

In today’s hyperconnected and always online world, information, opinions, and conversations move at an incredible speed. So I may be late in responding to Margaret Wente’s opinion piece”Coding for kids: another silly fad” for the Globe and Mail from nearly two weeks ago, but wanting to enter the conversation that started in the days following is what got me thinking of finally starting to blog about education. With that said, here are my thoughts on the role of coding and computer science in today’s classroom.
One of Wente’s arguments was that only a small percentage of the labour force is going to need to know how to code. While it may be true, it shows a fundamental misunderstanding of why we teach coding, or for that matter, anything in the classroom. How many jobs rely on trigonometry, basic chemistry, understanding the physics of flight, visual arts, music, or geography? Yet we teach all of these to students regardless of what careers they end up in.
Education does not equal job training like an apprenticeship does. What coding does teach is a number of soft skills that are always going to be valuable. Coding teaches problem-solving in a very direct way that most activities do not. You can’t code without breaking down what you are trying to accomplish into smaller and smaller steps and tackling them one at a time, coming up with sometimes creative solutions for getting from point A to B. Bugs in the code are ever present and so you iterate and try again. This is part of the process and your software is never perfect; constantly working towards small improvements helps students develop resiliency and a growth mindset. These are skills that are useful in any field.
Another of Wente’s points was that “You don’t have to understand code to understand computers, any more than you have to understand an engine system to drive a car, or indoor plumbing to use a toilet”. While that is true, neither of those things is as pervasive as software is. Software is present in nearly everything in your day to day life and is incredibly important in any field a student may want to work in. Agriculture, medical, retail, manufacturing, transportation, finance, mining, automotive, etc. all heavily rely on software. In Kevin Kelly’s book The Inevitable he argues that within a few decades almost every object you touch will be smart and networked in some way, and if it isn’t it will be seen as useless or broken. Does this mean everyone needs to code? Not exactly, but everyone needs to understand software and coding is a great way to do that. When the world is run by software, don’t you want people to understand what’s going on under the hood?
I will admit that coding is not the be all end all and that the conversations around coding need to be more comprehensive. We need to be discussing not just coding but computer science in general, and I think that sometimes this is where these arguments stem from (no pun intended). However, teaching a student the power of a few lines of code is a powerful introduction to computer science. So teachers, keep up the coding, just don’t stop there.
