How to teach coding for kids

Not only are traditional computer skills not enough for the labor market today, but everyone has to have minimal knowledge of basic programming skills, whatever their field of work.

So we see many schools and countries begin the process of teaching programming to children in schools of young ages, and today in this article we will see a number of ways in which you can teach your child programming yourself at home.

1- I don’t know what age it is to start teaching my child programming.

Well, there’s no specific age for this because it depends mainly on the child’s existing information and ability to handle the basics of working with the computer. Although there are many curricula and manuals for the education of children from 5 years old

2- What basic information should a child have before learning programming?

There are some basic things that a child must learn to understand and work well with programming concepts, the most important of which are:

A- Logical thinking:

Logical thinking is one of the most important skills to learn before you start learning programming, you can develop this skill in your child by motivating him to think about a problem like looking for a game or solving a problem to get to his favorite food, where he has to divide the problem into smaller problems and solve it, taking into account each other’s impact, and most importantly, thinking and planning before you start doing the work.

B- Serial Work:

For example, if you want to bring a glass of water, you have to do a series of operations in a sequential and sequential form:
- Bring the cup
- Place the cup under the tap
- Opening of water
You can’t skip or replace any of the previous steps, you have to work as it is to get the work done right.

C- Conditions:

This concept may be easier to teach children because they have lived it since childhood, for example:
If you arrange your toys, we’ll get you candy.
That is, the purchase of candy for the child depends primarily on the condition that the child arranges his or her toys.

D- Concept of variables:

Well, to be honest, this may be difficult for him at first, because he probably didn’t have to deal with it at the beginning of his life, but the fun of teaching kids is that there’s always a game to teach a child something and my favorite game to this concept is the following:
We’ll get a box of paper and write a bunch of letters on a number of papers, and when the paper’s in the box, it’s called her name.
For example, when we put the paper with the letter A on it, then the name of the box becomes “A.”

3- How can I encourage my child to learn these things?

You can do the impossible with the kid by convincing him that you’re playing with him, trying not to make all the talk about programming and computing, but, on the contrary, tie it to his dreams and aspirations and how you can help him grow up in any profession, and how he can design his own games and play them without waiting to buy them at the store, when the kid realizes this joy he will have this interest on his own.

4- I don’t know how to CODE, but I want to teach it to my kid What should I do?

You don’t have to have the full knowledge to be able to teach it programming, there are many platforms that have been created dedicated to parents to help them teach their children programming like scratch, which is the month between them and they have the full content of the education process, and you can also involve your child in many events that are concerned with teaching children programming and are spread around the world like Hour of code and so on.

5- How do I start teaching him?

It’s simple to start with him in the Scratch language that I told you about earlier, to learn the basic concepts about this and grow up with it a little bit, and to give him some fun where he can do a lot of games and comic stories, then move to some advanced languages like c++ or python and let him do some simple programs that match his age.