I Am Teaching My First Grader To Code and You Should Too

It is now easier than ever to teach your kids to code. When I was a kid, we did not have anything like the resources that each child has today. My daughter just graduated from kindergarten and this summer, before she heads off to first grade, seems the perfect time to teach her programming. I wanted to teach my children to code at an early age — not because I wanted them to learn how to code, but because I wanted them to learn how to learn.

My kids have grown up in a different era from mine — on a steady diet of iPads, touch screens, and Netflix. They are much more comfortable with technology (and more spoiled it) than any generation that came before them. (At a young age, kids absorb at a much greater rate, so it was natural for us to try to use something that they were comfortable using to teach them something.

Lately, many websites have popped up to help kids learn to code using a simplified block programming language. Coding on these sites consists of dragging and dropping blocks of ‘code’ on the screen, instead of typing out text. Sites like codecademy.com, scratch.mit.edu, and code.org are free sites that teach your young one to program.

We looked at quite a few of these and settled on code.org. The others were awesome, but two things about code.org stood out for me.

The first was what code.org calls “Hour of Code” — which is a one-hour introduction to coding that features characters from ‘Frozen’. If you have a young daughter in your home, you probably have watched the movie more then you are likely to admit. ‘Frozen’ would get my daughter interested, but it is the academic side of code.org would keep her engaged.

Code.org was launched in 2013 to advocate for wider access to computer science learning in schools.

And that academic side of code.org was the second thing that stood out to me. The site has well thought-out lesson plans that can be used by teachers (and the occasional parent) to bring learning to life. They are impressive and helped me focus on being a teacher. The lesson plans explain loops, events, conditionals and other computer science fundamentals and correspond to on-screen exercises.

MIT professor Mitchel Resnick wrote that when you teach your child to program, your child is not just learning to code, but also coding to learn. I have no idea what will happen to the tech industry 15 years from now when my child graduates from college, but my hope is that teaching them to learn at a young age will help them in whatever they want to do in life.

Resnick, M. (2013, May 08). Learn to Code, Code to Learn (EdSurge News). Retrieved July 21, 2016, from https://www.edsurge.com/news/2013-05-08-learn-to-code-code-to-learn